Article 28753 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (Intro) Message-ID: <1990Dec7.173046.25642@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 7 Dec 90 17:30:46 GMT Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator) Organization: University of California Lines: 30 The following posts are bits of story from an ongoing Shadowrun campaign, focusing on one character, the decker Jayhawk Davies. There will be a consistent title of "Jayhawk N" on them, so set your Kill files now if you're not interested. Background: A South American organization, Montaigne Paradisio, has set up research bases in Seattle, and has produced a number of nasty biotech innovations including the ghoul-plague that left Redmond quarentined for four weeks. The party consists of people who have a personal stake in getting rid of these bases, led by Duende, a defector from Montaigne Paradisio whom they have grudgingly come to trust. It has become apparent that the Paradisians are very accomplished mages, and that they have learned to work magic on the Matrix. As the story opens, Duende has learned that the head of the Seattle operation, "High Priest" Aliantha, and four of her best people are recovering in a hidden base in the mountains, having been severely hurt but not finished by his previous attempt on their lives. He sends Jayhawk to try to infiltrate their system while he plans a run on the ground. We play with rather nonstandard rules, but I think the only relevant difference is that we think of the Matrix itself as a magical phenomenon, the Awakening of the Net, though one need not be mageborn to be a decker. Decking code, as a consequence, depends on the living will of the decker to be successful, just as magic does; you can't automate everything and let the machine do the work for you. In some sense you must be *there*, in the computer. And this carries with it certain dangers. Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@enzyme.berkeley.edu Article 28754 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (1) Message-ID: <1990Dec7.173229.25730@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 7 Dec 90 17:32:29 GMT References: <1990Dec7.173046.25642@agate.berkeley.edu> Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator) Organization: University of California Lines: 135 (1) Aliantha 6:30 pm, May 2, 2050 Jayhawk was studying the security node with great interest when she was queried, suddenly and sharply, from the CPU. Hastily she seized on packet labels from the dataflow around her, sent them back, modified just a little to explain her presence as--no time to check what, some utility probably. A second's pause. Another query, met the same way. Then nothing. Jayhawk swore. That was no security program, not the second time. Something was awake in the system, and probably aware of her presence. Suddenly her Matrix image struck her as a deadly liability. She was too well known, too recognizable. If they realized who they were dealing with, they'd be on to her in force, no chance to bluff. Well, if Duende can look like anything he pleases on the Matrix, why can't I? She retreated to the bland telecom node adjacent to the SAN, dug in memory for a scrap of graphics code--the jaguar she'd designed to mimic Paradisian IC, then never used. Patched it in across her Matrix image, wincing. The interface wasn't meant to handle a body-image like that; the sensations it passed back to her were neither human nor jaguar but an awkward mix. She freed her viewpoint for a moment from her image, looked at herself. A jaguar, all right, but silver, with metallic eyes and traceries of steel showing through the fur. It would have to do. At least it didn't look like *her*. She curled herself at the fringe of the simulated jungle path, began moni- toring. Nothing. No abnormal system activity, if her guesses about what was normal for this system were correct. An image formed in front of her suddenly, without a warning ripple in the dataflow. A square glass tank, massive and solid, filled with murky orange liquid. Something stirred in its depths, drew back from her gaze. Her jaguar image was not well integrated enough for its fur to stand on end, but every nerve prickled. "Who are you?" A woman's voice, from some speaker of the tank. It was a particularly well-defined Matrix image; she could smell it, a wash of cinnamon and copper, feel the faint warmth radiating from it. Without waiting for an answer, it went on, "What are you doing here?" "Checking up on you," said Jayhawk with as much nonchalance as she could muster. "Is this the best you can do? Security by stagnation, so much IC that the system can hardly move, static defenses to hide behind? I'm not impressed." "Who are you?" A little sharper now, the voice of someone not accustomed to being balked. Far too much expression for IC; she was speaking to another person. "That would be telling." "I could take it from you, you know. You're not defended from me." A jolt of panic burned through Jayhawk's nerves. A mage, she's a *mage*. Good God, it must be Aliantha herself. She contemplated jacking out, rem- embered a similar experience at Wired Lightning. She was probably trapped. "I'm sure you could, but then you risk offending the one who sent me, don't you? Better safe than sorry." "Hm." The orange liquid swirled, shifted. Jayhawk avoided trying too hard to decide what was within it. "Whose are you?" A thoughtful pause. "Duende? No, it's much too early for that." The badly-integrated Matrix image had its uses, Jayhawk realized; the jaguar hadn't reacted to the mention of her employer's name. Good. She'd think about what Aliantha's statement implied later, if there was a later. "Oriel! You must belong to Oriel! I didn't know he knew about this place. And how is Oriel doing nowadays? We haven't seen each other for so long." Jayhawk filed the name away for future reference, said cautiously, "I wouldn't know." She rose, stretched, looked around the node. "Since we're here, perhaps you could show me the rest of the setup. I'm not impressed so far, but the CPU looked more promising." Nonchalantly, she strolled forward-- And was stopped cold. There was no perceptible barrier, but she was brought up with a bounce, unable to go forward. "That's very rude, you know," said the tank, and giggled. "Hmph," said Jayhawk, unable to think of a good reply. Somewhere in background, she realized suddenly, she was being traced, though she couldn't see the program. Another decker? It didn't matter. She sent code chasing after it, down the link that led back to Kurt's apartment. The trace wasn't showing up on her normal sensors, so she had no way to monitor its progress. "I'm rude? Look who's talking," she said to Aliantha, stalling. "I suppose I should have realized that that wouldn't work. You're fairly clever." A short pause, then, "But you're not really here, how odd. How do you manage?" Another trace lashed out, lightning-fast. Jayhawk, realizing that there was no way she could keep blocking them, reared up to her full height and slammed sudden, electic-blue claws (claws? nice touch, Jay) into the side of the tank. Standard attack software, who knows if it'll work-- Glass cracked, cinnamon fluid spilled out and vanished. Jay clawed out again, hit a barrier of some kind, smooth and invisible. Her claws slid down it soundlessly, the interface not good enough to provide screetching. Not just shielding, she was *blocked*. As she'd been blocked from escaping the node. Magic, she uses magic, that's not *fair*! The other woman's voice was a little shaken, but her tone was friendly. "I like you; you've got guts. You'll be fun." The trace ran through to completion. Jayhawk swore, tried a full-strength retreat from the node, bounced again. No escape. Her Matrix image was frayed with panic, too unfamiliar to sustain easily. Kurt, they're going to find Kurt! She triggered the software switch that controlled Kurt's little innovation, the ace in the hole that had given her courage to run Aliantha's system. Cut in the operating system running in headware memory, dumping out almost all her useful code; linked it to the node processor, offered headware and wetware as extra processing power for its use. Merging her mind with the computer's, Channa had called it, though Jayhawk thought in more technical terms. Disappeared. -- Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@enzyme.berkeley.edu Article 28755 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (2) Message-ID: <1990Dec7.173408.25828@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 7 Dec 90 17:34:08 GMT References: <1990Dec7.173046.25642@agate.berkeley.edu> Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator) Organization: University of California Lines: 120 (2) SPU B4/732 05:02:50 18:31:14 She was aware of information, flowing smoothly through her in both directions, precise and pleasing. There was only one hitch, one annoyance in the clarity of the datastream. A process resident in her domain, using up her time and attention, not moving through as it should. She sent a query to the process, asking its authorization and purpose. It did not respond. Instead, it demanded processor time, access to memory; demands which were accompanied by none of the proper signals, but which it did not seem possible to reject. It was delaying her normal business, interfering with the system. An intruder. An attempt to terminate the process failed. It appeared to originate outside her node, and did not respond to her standard abort messages. She attempted to control its allocation of space and time, limit it to a reasonable subset of her capacities. Failed. It ignored the partitions she set up in the dataflow, demanding attention from routines that should have been protected from it. Moved across what should have been boundary lines as if they did not exist. She attempted to relocate it into the next node, without effect. The node refused to accept a package without accurate identifications, and the annoying process refused to identify itself. A second passed. She tried to trace the process, identify its origin. It did not lead to the next node, as she would have expected. It led *outside*. The concept was novel to her. She did not seem to have any way of affecting what was *outside*. It occured to her absently that she had not had a problem of this kind in a long time. It was interesting, if annoying. She searched storage, trying to find means of dealing with the intruding process. There were security programs available, but the conditions for executing them had not been met. Useless to her, unless the CPU instructed her otherwise. She sent a query to the CPU, continued her search while she waited for the response. Storage also provided some other algorithms for dealing with intrusion, but when she examined them they appeared to be meaningless. Shoot it with a gun? She found stored code which had determinants in common with *gun*, executed it. Nothing happened. She examined the code more closely, found it unimpressive--a collection of infantile tricks, things she had tried in the first second of the problem. Familiar tricks, as if she had seen most of them before. A quick scan of memory established that she had--had written the code? An odd concept. Her purpose was to transmit; she had not considered the possibility of creating things before. A second passed. Building on the stored ideas, she attempted to trap the annoying process in a small sealed shell, something which could emulate her responses while preventing the process from accessing her directly. Failed. The intruder's ability to ignore what should have been overriding directives was becoming actively annoying. The CPU sent her a negative message. She was not authorized to trigger the security programs. No breach of security existed. The annoying process moved out of the node, leaving the dataflow clean and fast. Pleased, she began to inventory ways to prevent the problem from reoccuring. There did not seem to be any way to isolate her node from the *outside* origin of the intruder. Perhaps she could prepare a shell to interact with it, given enough time. There were new ideas in the stored code, ones that might possibly be adapted.... Abruptly a subprogram was forced into her queue, ignoring the normal order of processing. It demanded access and space; she had no choice but to provide them, though this was even more annoying than the intruder had been. Then it sank into background, barely noticable, drawing minimal resources. She queried it for its function--she did not normally support background processes, as they degraded response. No answer. Queried the CPU: no answer. A second passed. [In his apartment, Kurt was jarred to attention by a sudden movement from Jayhawk. She sat up unsteadily, still jacked into her deck, swung her feet under her. Her eyes were closed, and the monitors threaded to her temples showed Matrix-style traces, though faster and smoother than he was accustomed to seeing. With one clumsy hand, she reached up, plucked the monitor wires off. In a panic, Kurt grabbed for her dataline, broke the connection.] She attempted to set up safeguards which would prevent execution of such jobs in the future, and found that they were already in place. Somehow the subprogram had bypassed them. She began to analyze the security measures, look for the hole which the subprogram had used. It had not previously occured to her to analyze her own routines. It was an interesting task. Her status was queried from the CPU; she gave a standard response. A second passed. Another query reached her, but not from the CPU. From...outside. She was being requested to--to leave? A quick memory search verified the concept but did not give it reference. She was being requested to relocate outside the normally accessable space, or at least to relocate a portion of her system there. The annoying process had come from *outside*. Perhaps if she had access to its point of origin she could prevent it from reoccuring. She let the tugging take her, felt the infinitely strange sensation of being dissociated from her processors, the node itself-- And lost consciousness in the sudden static of jack-out. -- Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@enzyme.berkeley.edu Article 28757 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!yale!mintaka!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!apple!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (3) Message-ID: <1990Dec7.173607.26032@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 7 Dec 90 17:36:07 GMT References: <1990Dec7.173046.25642@agate.berkeley.edu> Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator) Organization: University of California Lines: 152 (3) Farewells 8:00 pm, May 2, 2050 "A subprocessor!" Jayhawk laughed softly. "I was a subprocessor, and a Blue one at that. Not the most useful kind of node to possess. I need to get at the CPU." Channa looked at her in horror. "You lost your mind into the thoughts of the machine, and you want to do it *again*?" "It will work. I know it. Give me the CPU and I control the entire system, it's set up like that. And there must be something pretty impressive in there, to be worth the security." "She is right," said Duende. "We need someone inside, or we're not going to be able to make this attack work. And neither Yoichi nor I can do it." Channa folded her arms, stared at Jayhawk. The decker was sprawled back on the seat of their van, eyes open but unfocused. She seemed perfectly calm, impossibly so. Channa had known Jayhawk for over three years, had seen her tackle a number of difficult runs. She was gutsy, but not fearless-- before each one she'd been in a frenzy of nervous activity, checking and rechecking code, tuning her hardware, nerving herself up for the challenge. "Won't Aliantha spot you?" "She won't have time," said Jayhawk confidently. "Channa, you know and I know that this needs to be done, and I'm the one who can do it. I'm not second-guessing *your* half of the operation." It occured to Channa, with a cold prickle of horror, that this might not be Jayhawk at all. That she might be talking to Aliantha herself, or some creation of hers, something sent to learn their plans and then report back. She took a deep breath. "Jayhawk. May I read your mind?" She expected the usual ferocious refusal. Jayhawk looked up at her for a moment, smiled dreamily, and said, "Really, Channa? Sure, go ahead. You'll see I'm telling the truth, and we can get this over with." Channa looked up at Duende for permission--a habit she despised, but was having trouble breaking--gathered her thoughts, hesitated. If it *were* Aliantha....She remembered reading Lefty's mind, the week of flashbacks, nightmares, moments in which her own thoughts seemed alien. Aliantha would be worse. She'd probed Jayhawk's mind before, knew that she could do it, though it was not enjoyable. The machine-shaped patterns of the decker's thoughts jarred with hers, invariably left her shaken and ill. But if it were not Jayhawk, if she probed into mindcontrol or possession, it could kill her. Or worse. Walking into the Hidden Fortress with a traitor reporting on their every move would kill all of them. She really had no choice. She called on the Power with a gesture, a word--crutches, it was all inside her, but tonight she needed crutches. Brushed the very fringe of Jayhawk's thoughts, listened to them. Clear. Pellucidly clear, no distractions, no extraneous thoughts. Jay was contemplating the method she'd use to get into the Hidden Fortress CPU, reviewing her software--Channa could guess that much, though the technical nuances were meaningless to her. It did not quite feel like Jayhawk. Nerving herself, Channa dug a little deeper, closing her eyes to focus on the inner voices.--Jayhawk. Is that you?--Not really a question, but a pointed probe. --I am Jayhawk.-- --Why are you doing this?-- --It will remove Aliantha, the annoyance, the obstruction to our plans.-- Channa shivered. The decker's thoughts were neither words nor images, but sensations, raw unfiltered stuff that her mind refused to cope with. A feeling of...water flowing? Something rippling the water, interfering with its passage? A grating like nails on a blackboard, a soft nagging pain? No; she was forcing her own interpretation on something too alien to perceive directly. On the thoughts of the machine. --Why do you think you can do this?-- She caught only the fringe of the answer before she broke the link with a cry, recoiled into her husband's waiting arms. "Dear lord," she whispered. Why did we let her do this, how did we let it get so far? Dear god, she's not human any longer. "Do you see?" said Jayhawk, watching her with wide curious eyes. And: "Is it really Jayhawk?" in chorus from several of the others. "Jay," she said, voice forceless with the backlash of her spell. "Jay, please, don't do this. We can make the run without Matrix backup. It's not--it can't be worth what you're doing to yourself." Jayhawk shook her head firmly. Channa looked to Duende for support, found none. "Shall we?" said the decker brightly. "Before it gets too late?" ** Three-quarters of an hour later the team was making its last approach to the Hidden Fortress, off-road through a dense pine forest. They had left Jayhawk in the communications van to do her decking, Kurt to watch her. Duende had a radio link to Kurt in one ear, but so far he had nothing to report. Suddenly the sky above them erupted in incandescent white, damped down almost instantly by the flare-comp in their nightsights to a still lurid but bearable brilliance. Duende threw himself to the ground; the others, slower, were still standing when the blast wave hit, knocking them aside like so many twigs and snapping trees off halfway up. Unbearable loudness. A huge cloud reared up on the horizon, spread into a looming umbrella. They collected themselves hastily, found a few scrapes but no major injuries. Already the forest ahead of them was crackling into fire. Duende pushed on for a few moments, trying to estimate the scope of the explosion; then the spreading flames pushed them back. They fell back to the car, sped off just as the first siren wails began to penetrate their nearly deaf ears. Every radio and telephone they carried was dead. They found the van where they had left it, ten miles from the Hidden Fortress. It had been gutted as if by an explosion. Kurt had been thrown clear, lay tumbled in a patch of shrubbery, unconscious but alive. Duende sealed his armor, forced his way into the smouldering remains of the truck to look for Jayhawk. He found nothing except for a smudge of char and dust where she had been, at the epicenter of the blast. They abandoned the van and went home. Channa managed to heal Kurt well enough that he could tell his story. It was not very informative. Jayhawk had made her way in through the gateway IC, headed directly for the CPU. Just outside its defenses, she had waved a salute to the great feathered serpant that encircled it, then activated her interface code. The screen had gone static-blank, then black. And then the blast. He remembered nothing more. News reports made it clear that the Hidden Fortress had been removed by a blast of nearly nuclear proportions. No one within a quarter mile of the center could have survived. And every radio, every telephone, every piece of communications equipment east of the mountains was dead, including the well-shielded phone in the samurai's head. "I am not sure Aliantha is dead," said Duende contentedly, "but the others with her ought to be, after that." The others were silent, too grieved to share his victory. -- Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@enzyme.berkeley.edu Article 28855 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!apple!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (4) Message-ID: <1990Dec10.103204.186@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 10 Dec 90 10:32:04 GMT Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator) Organization: University of California Lines: 65 (4) Julia 1:30 am, May 3, 2050 Channa wrapped herself more tightly in her sleeping bag, looked across at Julia. The journalist's face was half-hidden by shadows, giving no indication of her thoughts. "Julia," Channa said slowly, "can I talk to you about something rather... personal? I'd talk to my husband, but it'll just upset him even more; he's very worried about me right now. And I don't think anyone else here will understand." Julia looked up as if jarred out of her own thoughts, nodded. "I read Jayhawk's mind, just before she died." Julia started, looked hard at Channa, then relaxed again. "I didn't--didn't really understand what I found, I was hoping you might be able to offer some insight." "I'm not a decker. But I'll tell you what I can." "She was....She was thinking very strangely. Very clear, very precise, without all the little side thoughts that people usually have. But the way she was thinking--" Channa waved her hands helplessly, at a loss for words. "I tried to find out why she thought she could succeed at the Hidden Fortress, why she was willing to do it. But--" A long pause. "I can't describe her reasons, though I remember them. I can't put them into words. I'm sorry, I didn't realize it would be so hard." "It's probably better not to understand," said Julia carefully. "It's not your path." "I know, I know. That's what Casey has been telling me all evening. But it seems like a betrayal of Jayhawk, to blot out what I learned from her." "Betrayal? Why? It seems to me that if you had to invade her privacy, the less you do with the knowledge, the better." "I know. It's just....She was happy, Julia. I didn't see it at the time; I was too worried, and her feelings were too foreign. She agreed to let me read her mind, which she usually hated. It was as if she knew she wouldn't see me again, and she wanted to share what she was feeling. A goodbye present. I've never seen her so happy, so content. She thought she would probably die, and she didn't mind." "I've seen people get like that. A friend of mine once pulled a gun and shot a Yakuza boss. Perfectly calm, not scared at all. Decided it had to be done and did it." She raised her eyes from the shadows, looked hard at Channa. "It's a dangerous state of mind. We need you here, we can't spare you like that." Channa shook her head, wincing. "I intend to go on living, I always do. But Jay was more than fey, she was--I don't know. You're probably right, it's better not to think about this too much." She wrapped her arms around her knees, resting her head on the back of her crossed wrists, shoulders slumped. "I wish I could have stopped her, I wish....But unless I was willing to mind-control her--" She did not look up to see Julia's reaction, and the other woman said nothing. "--I don't think there was anything I could have done." "No," said Julia slowly. "I don't think there was." -- Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@enzyme.berkeley.edu Article 28856 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!usc!apple!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (5) Message-ID: <1990Dec10.103406.396@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 10 Dec 90 10:34:06 GMT References: <1990Dec10.103204.186@agate.berkeley.edu> Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator) Organization: University of California Lines: 127 (5) Lefty Channa let herself into the RV, found Duende sitting on the back seat, staring out the window. He didn't seem to react to her presence, though she was certain he'd noticed her, probably before she ever touched the door. "I think I know why Jayhawk died," she said without preamble. "Do you remember when Lefty kidnapped her, and we rescued her? And everyone was worried because it seemed ridiculously easy, so I mindprobed her and found she'd been tampered with, but couldn't make out what the commands were supposed to do?" "She set them off later, in the Osiris CPU, and melted down most of the University net. I remember." "Afterwards we tried to figure out what they were...." ** "I realize this will be difficult," said Channa, "but try to relax, clear your mind of extraneous thoughts." To her surprise, Jayhawk nodded confidently, settled back into the cushions, closed her eyes, and in the space of three deliberate breaths seemed almost to go into a trance. Eyes still closed, she said quietly, "First thing a matrix-runner learns. Go ahead." Cursing the injuries that would not let her use magic to aid Jayhawk's recollection, Channa questioned her, stepping through the sequence of actions that had destroyed Osiris, watching for anything that would suggest the buried material peeking out. There was nothing. Memories up to a point, and then--blankness. "Not a flicker," said Jayhawk, her voice expressionless. "Channa, I thought hypnosis couldn't make you do something against your will." "Usually," said Channa. "I thought you couldn't damage hardware from software." "I see your point. What now?" "We try again. Remember what you did, focus on that, describe it in detail. Don't concern yourself with me. Basically you're talking to yourself, explaining to yourself what you're doing. Start with testing the node for, um, usage level." She listened to Jayhawk's recitation, nudging her along when she faltered but otherwise trying not to interfere. She could understand almost none of it. "....and set off the internal alert." Jayhawk's voice trailed off; Channa looked up sharply, saw her go limp as a rag, not breathing visibly at all. "Jay!" She shook the decker, gently at first, then harder. "Jayhawk! *Caroline!* Wake up!" For a moment Jay's head lolled bonelessly; then she stiffened, drew in an unsteady breath, said aggrievedly, "Why'd you wake me up? I almost had it." Channa held her shoulders for a moment, dizzy with relief--it had been all too reminiscent of the death of Wired Lightning's decker. "Go too deep and you won't remember any of it--that's useless. We can always try again. What happened?" Jayhawk stared off into space for a moment, then said, "I was clearing everything out of Osiris and pulling in a lot of power, in preparation for loading a new OS which was going to extensively--this is crazy--extensively reconfigure the hardware. I was waiting on a transmission from...outside... with software and specs, I'd sent a message requesting them, that must have been what Duende saw. We were--I was going to pull the whole system together, single-user, and dedicate it to...this is hard to explain." She launched into a flood of technicalities. "Whoah," said Channa. "Speak English, Jay. I'm missing every other word." "You've been in my *mind*," said Jayhawk with annoyance, "but you can't understand what I'm saying?" She glared at the older woman. "I'm not probing you now, I can't, it hurts too much; and I haven't got the background to understand a lot of what I picked up earlier. I don't know anything about the Matrix, and eight hours is hardly time to learn." "Got it." Jayhawk seemed relieved. "In English? Alive...." "Alive?" "Something like that. Coherent, very complex, autonomous. *Awakened*, that's a good word. We were going to Awaken Osiris." She whistled. "I can't help thinking it would have worked, too." "'We?'" said Channa softly. "Why would they want *you* to do this, Jay, why not do it themselves? Because it kills the decker who implements it?" Jayhawk glanced down, shrugged. "I wouldn't be surprised." Her tone was somewhere between guilt and anger. "Sure did a job on my machine." ** "We never did disentangle all of the commands in there, it was very skill- fully done and we were too busy. Jay felt, and I'm afraid I agreed with her, that she could probably resist them now that she knew they were there. But in retrospect....It was keyed to go off when she found herself in control of a CPU; and that's what she was trying for at the Hidden Fortress." Duende nodded thoughtfully. "At Osiris it drew enough power to burn out every transformer on campus. Fortress was a much larger system, and probably had a substantial power plant of its own. The code may not have been configured to deal with that, leading to the explosion. I think you're right, Channa." "I should have realized sooner." "I regret losing Jayhawk, but I expected to lose someone in that attack. It appears that Lefty may inadvertantly have done us a favor." Channa bit her lip, choked back the angry response she wanted to make. After two months with Duende, she should have known better than to expect sympathy from him. She contented herself with one barb, over her shoulder as she left: "Makes our 'destruction of the Hidden Fortress' look pretty damn accidental, doesn't it?" She had never found it easy to read his expression. There was nothing there now, nothing at all. -- Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@enzyme.berkeley.edu Article 28941 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!know!sdd.hp.com!usc!apple!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Combat in Shadowrun Message-ID: <1990Dec11.171633.6890@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 11 Dec 90 17:16:33 GMT Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator) Organization: University of California Lines: 81 mok@pawl.rpi.edu (... Mok) writes: >mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) writes: >>We tried this and decided it was not worth the >>awkwardnesses involved, but then we don't do much combat. >I have to wonder about that. We do more planning and relations, but almost >every job is ging to include at least one fight. It is not necessarily >a guns blazing fight, but a fight nonetheless. > / ( (_/(_) \ Eat a pop-tart for Jesus --><-- mok@pawl.rpi.edu We're not Shadowrunners. It's a one-on-one campaign that, though it didn't start that way, has developed into a shadow war between the party (and allies) and a sinister South American corporation/cult. We don't have the power to oppose them openly very often, so we avoid doing so whenever possible. There would have been exactly 3 major fights in the 12-month campaign, except that Jayhawk pre-empted the third one. There have been several dozen lesser ones, but they're widely spaced (except for the week when we were hit every night--taught us the folly of having a known address). I can't resist posting 'a day in the life of--', the chronicle of the last 24 hours, though it's not very representative--the second-worst 24 hours we've ever spent, after the big attack on Cavilard Base itself. 6:00 AM. Duende and Yoichi meet with Ivan, whom they hope is involved with the Bangkok resistance movement, on the Matrix. He invites them on a run against the Bangkok branch of the enemy operation. They realize *just* in time that he's not what he seems to be, and that they're walking into a trap; manage to bluff their way out. 8:00 AM. Casey and Channa spend the morning collecting data on the sinister theatrical troupe from Singapore, whose stage illusionist is probably the most powerful sorceress in Seattle. 3:00 PM. Casey and Channa pick up Grant and Argent from the shadow clinic where they have been recuperating from the last run, fill them in on events, and take them to a party held by Julia and Ratty. Much discussion of strategy. 3:30 PM. Duende and Yoichi go off into the hills and play Frisbee with Yoichi's new hunter drones, while Duende tries to decide if Yoichi has been influenced by the enemy during his stay in Manilla. Luckily he decides otherwise. 6:00 PM. Duende meets with Shamrock, a high-level independent operative working for the enemy, while the rest of the group covers him with sniper rifles from a distance. Ostensibly they are there to shoot Shamrock if he misbehaves, but they agree among themselves that they must shoot Duende if it seems likely he is betraying them. 7:00 PM. Duende provides the others with a tape recording of what Shamrock said, including his offer of truce; a vehement and tense discussion follows. The truce is rejected and new plan of attack is drawn up. 12:00 PM. Ratty and Julia meet with a actor of the theatrical troupe at an abandoned warehouse on the docks, while the rest of the group covers them from a rooftop. The actor turns out to have an invisible werecat with him--the party's first experience with Physical Invisibility, and a nasty surprise--but negotiates honorably, perhaps having noticed the 6 armed people and hunter drone bearing on him. 3:00 AM. The group drives to the Redmond Barrens. Their vehicle is surrounded by ghouls, driven off by Yoichi with searchlights and flares from the drone. Ratty summons up the ghost of a dead shaman, and learns which among the dead hold the information the group needs to make their plan work. 4:00 AM. Duende proposes immediately making the run on the police-held base where the enemy ghosts are to be summoned, and the rest of the group nearly jettisons him on the spot--they're running on stim and nerves. They drop off Ratty and Julia at Julia's apartment, and park their RV well outside Seattle for a well-earned morning's sleep. No causalties, except for the Frisbees, but a very nerve-wracking line of play. Probably about two playing sessions' worth, if we played in sessions. I love talking to the bad guys.... Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@enzyme.berkeley.edu Article 28948 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wuarchive!usc!apple!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (6) Message-ID: <1990Dec11.194937.19549@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 11 Dec 90 19:49:37 GMT Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator) Organization: University of California Lines: 229 (6) Forest Jayhawk struggled back to consciousness, found herself lying on lush grass in the sun. Startled, she sat up, stared wildly around her. All she could see in any direction was an unbroken wall of trees, except behind her, where a single steep peak reached up towards the clear sky. It seemed very high, although there was no snow on it. A jet hummed by overhead, passing over the mountain and vanishing. Otherwise there was no sign of human presence. The grass beneath her was soft and sweet-smelling, but obviously untended. After a moment she realized what must have happened, and swore aloud. Stim- sense. She was caught in a stimsense illusion. She must have failed against the Hidden Fortress, walked into a trap of Aliantha's perhaps. For several futile minutes she struggled with her perceptions, tried to break through to the reality behind the illusion. Nothing happened. She wondered briefly whether she might still be on the Matrix, but she had no access to her deck, no sense of the linkage. Tried to remember what had happened at the Hidden Fortress, but there was nothing at all past the memory of activating the interface code, a weird moment of simultaneous explosion and implosion. Nothing. "All right, Aliantha," she said aloud. "What's the point? Might as well get on with it. If you want me to talk, I'll talk." Only a scatter of birdsong answered her. She got to her feet, discovered that she was wearing a loose white dress, belted at the waist with a gold braid, and nothing else. For want of anything better to do, she walked down the hillside, into the woods. The grass was comfortable to her bare feet; the forest, she found, much less so. By the time she came to a small, pebbly stream she was limping, and she had a small scratch on one heel. She sat down on the bank, dipped her feet into the water. It was numbingly cold, bearable only for a few seconds. She tasted it, found it reasonably fresh though oddly flavored. If it was stimsense, it was a good job, she had to admit. It had to be stimsense, didn't it? She couldn't really be alone in the woods, woods which seemed, even to her grossly limited experience, much too warm and bright-colored to be anywhere near Seattle. But if it was stimsense, where was the plotline, the point of it all? "Boring!" she said aloud. "Is this the best you can do? Where are the cybercommandos?" It was intensely dull. Without a deck she had no access to the code in her headware memory, nothing to read, no programming to do. She stripped the white dress off, looked at it; not even a tag to read. Several hours crawled by. She went back up onto the hillside to lie in the sun, realized only too late that she was getting sunburned. Back down to the stream to splash cold water on her stinging arms and face. "All right! I'm sorry I said your security was bad, I was lying, I admit it. I just wanted to impress you. Come on, Aliantha, let's talk." She was trying not to think about Yoichi's experiences when he had been held under stimsense by the Paradisians. Not to remember his voice when he described having his heart cut out on the Aztec altar, over and over again. She knew what kind of pain her captors could inflict, if they chose. But she'd never imagined the kind of sheer *boredom* they could command. After endless hours the sun dipped down, and it became shockingly dark. A chill breeze blew down the streambed; she retreated from it, cut her heel again in the dark, eventually found a patch of bushes to hide in. The sky held no glow of city lights, only a wilderness of unfamiliar stars. She had never spent the night outdoors before. Eventually she managed to doze uncomfortably. Dawn found her stiff and cold, and ravenously hungry. The stream water did little to ease her stomach. She was seriously angry by now, as well as frightened. She spent the day limping downstream, having convinced herself that it was the most logical direction. In stimsense it hardly mattered, didn't it?--the edges of the area probably wrapped around, she'd find herself back at the hill sooner or later. She couldn't bear to sit still. Toward noon she twisted her ankle, had to rest for a while. The soles of her feet were covered with scratches and bruises. They hurt, but not as much as her stomach. She tasted a leaf, found it bitingly sour, spit it out. Searched for something else she could try, hunger overwhelming caution--she had no idea what might be poisonous. If her captors wanted her to suffer, no doubt they could arrange for *anything* she ate to poison her. Eventually she found a vine with round, nutlike balls on it. Two of them gentled the pangs in her belly, seemed to cause no ill effects. She picked the vine clean, knotted the nuts in her skirt, hobbled on downstream. By nightfall she was heartily sick of the nuts, and desperate for a human voice, the touch of the Matrix, a simple word to read. She talked to herself, to Aliantha, insulting the High Priestess' ancestry and decking style, pleading with her to come up with some kind of plotline for this delusion, even a bad one. One thing she did not say, moved by a kind of superstitious caution. She never promised Aliantha her help, never suggested that she might give in. The next dawn she woke feverish, with aching eyes and a prickling on her skin. She managed to stagger to the river, drank a little water. A fish peered out at her; she made a grab for it, succeeded only in getting wet. She had to lie in the sun for quite a while to stop the shivering. She blocked out lumps of pseudocode, a Matrix trap for Aliantha the next time they met. It was hard to remember any of the finesses without somewhere to write them down. After a few hours she felt a little better, managed to stagger downstream for two or three blocks before stopping. She found a few more nuts, looked at them dubiously. Were they making her sick, or had she just caught cold? Hunger eventually decided her. Stimsense. Subjective time under the wire could be much, much longer than realtime. She was beginning to appreciate what that could mean. She imagined Aliantha watching her suffering, broke into a torrent of weak curses. The next day she was worse, almost too dizzy to stand. Some vestige of stubbornness kept her moving downstream, but she made little progress. For a while during the afternoon she tried pretending she was an animal, looking for the magic medicinal herbs she'd been told animals could find. It didn't work. She was going to *die*. Too highly cybered to recover naturally, lost in this horrible wilderness, she was going to die. Perhaps that would be an escape from the stimsense trap. Or perhaps she would only find herself back on the grassy hill, at the beginning again. Restart the game. She found herself crying weakly, like a lost child. She couldn't bear to eat any more nuts. Her stomach contracted to a hard knot, but it was better than the runs. No toilet paper. Another night, or perhaps two, lost in a haze of delirium. When she was strong enough to stand, she kept moving roughly downstream. She had convinced herself that something must lie in that direction. The sea, maybe. A town. Anything but the terrible monotony of trees. Sunlit afternoon, one of the more lucid moments, moving along the stream- bank, thinking about computer games--it was beginning to seem to her that she was in one, an adventure game, had taken one of the wrong turns that lead to endless repeating trees and no goal. Abruptly she stepped into water, looked down in puzzlement. The stream spread out, forming a small pond or perhaps a lake. On the far side, a waterwheel turned slowly, the side of a wooden building visible behind it. Two paths led off from it, one south-west, one north. There was a lump of gold lying at the intersection of the paths. She shook her head violently, recognizing delirium. The paths and gold vanished, but the building remained. She hobbled around the lake, found that it was a two-story house, with curtained windows and a wooden porch. The door was locked, and no one responded to her pounding and shouting. She dragged over a large stick, hit the window with it. The stick bounced off, sending a painful jar up her arms. Behind the building was a small landing pad, a tiny jet parked on it. She couldn't get into that either. She lay down on the porch in front of the door, thinking that if the Pirate came out of his lair he would step on her, and then she could take his bag of gold away. Or bag of food, that would be better. Medicine. She remembered similar bouts of flu, back in the safety of the city. She was a Matrix runner, more wire than meat in her brain, she had to be careful or even a simple cold could lay her out. She wasn't meant for this barbaric life. It was going to kill her. Near evening she came around again, made one more unsteady circuit of the place. The jet seemed to suggest someone's presence, but there was still no answer to her calls. She giggled weakly. She had missed a turning right at the beginning, she needed the Brass Key to get in and it was probably north of the grassy hill, she would have to go back....Time to stop the game and start over. She didn't have the strength to go anywhere at all. But there was the waterwheel. If there was someone about, he should notice if the waterwheel stopped. She dragged herself over to it, tried to wedge her stick between its spokes. The stick snapped off cleanly. Not big enough. There was a good-sized log wedged between two others near the place where the stream went into the pond. She waded out into the water--it seemed warmer now, or maybe she was just feverish--and tried to wrestle it loose. After a terrible struggle she got it free, retreated to the asphalt to catch her breath. When she regained consciousness it was early morning. All the warmth had drained out of the surface below her, and she could barely move. When she tried to stand up, bright flashes exploded before her eyes, drove her back to her knees. She sat for a long time, arms wrapped around her legs, trying to gather her strength. She didn't seem to have any. "Put the tree in the wheel," she said aloud, trying to goad herself. Her voice was frightening in the silence. "Put the tree in the wheel and the wheel will stop." It seemed logical, a sensible next move. But so hard to do. An unexpected fit of coughing, a new misery, took her. When she could straighten up again there was blood on the asphalt. She turned away, managed to force herself to her feet. Don't look, Jayhawk. You don't want to know. Put the tree in the wheel, there's a good girl. Half-wading, half-resting on it, she managed to push the treetrunk down towards the waterwheel, watched the tip as the paddles pushed it under. For a terrible moment it seemed as if the whole tree would just pass right through. Then a paddle caught on a snag, and the wheel came to a grinding halt. Something inside it whirred angrily for a moment, then was silent. She just barely made it back to the shore before she collapsed. Warm arms, enfolding her, lifting her. An unfamiliar female voice: "Dear me, what's this?" She tried to open her eyes, couldn't. After a moment she was put down on a soft warm surface, her face close to something that smelled wonderfully of synthetic fibers and house dust. "Just a moment, dear," said the voice. "You'll be all right." Sounds of footsteps receeding, then returning. Something pricked her arm sharply; she started, actually managed to open her eyes for an instant. She saw only darkness, darkness that rose up around her like a wave and took her. -- Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@enzyme.berkeley.edu Article 28991 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!julius.cs.uiuc.edu!apple!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (7) Message-ID: <1990Dec12.044423.5449@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 12 Dec 90 04:44:23 GMT Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator) Organization: University of California Lines: 153 (7) Martha Jayhawk awoke to darkness and the delicious sensation of clean sheets underneath her. She felt a little dizzy, and ravenously hungry, but the fever seemed to have broken. She groped along the wall next to the bed, failed to find a light panel. A little unsteadily, she climbed out of bed, began to trace the wall. It was certainly not her bedroom at home, though it might have been one of the many hotel rooms they'd stayed in recently. A very dark one. She bumped into a dresser, felt along its top for a lamp. There was nothing there but a tray of hard round things. Hoping for candy, she put one in her mouth, but they were glassy and inedible. She put it back in the tray, wincing at the noise it made, and continued her search. The next thing she bumped into was a chair. She felt along it, touched warm human flesh, drew back with a start. A woman's voice, low and a little rough, said with surprise, "What is it? Who's there?" "I was looking for the light switch. I--" "Oh! Lights on." The room was flooded with a soft yellow-white light. Jayhawk found herself looking at a massive middle-aged woman, black-haired and with richly tanned skin, perhaps American Indian or some halfbreed stock. She was wearing a fuzzy blue bathrobe--Jayhawk was wearing one too, she noticed--sprawled back in the chair with a blanket over her. "I was beginning to wonder if you would ever wake up!" she said. "You've been unconscious for four days, ever since I found you. You should sit down." Finding herself more than a little unsteady, Jayhawk sat on the bed. "Where--" she began. "Do you want something to eat? Hm, probably not solid food so soon. Perhaps some soup?" "Please!" Her stomach tightened painfully at the thought. The woman got up hastily, went out through a door that opened on a touch- plate, returned almost at once with a small ceramic mug. "Here you go," she said, and then hastily "Not so fast!" as Jay took a large gulp. It burned all the way down, but seemed to undo some of the knots. "Where?" said Jayhawk, between swallows. "When? Who? And how?" "Dear me. I was hoping--Well, I suppose we both have questions, so I might as well start with yours, if I can figure them out." She pondered for a moment. "Where is simple enough. You're at Power Station 32, in--do you speak--?" She launched into a babble of what sounded like Spanish, frowned at Jayhawk's obvious incomprehension. "I see you don't. A pity. In the Gold Valley, you would call it, in central Ecuador." "Ecuador?" said Jayhawk incredulously. "I was in Seattle." "Well, Dorothy," said the other woman with a smile, "you're not in Seattle anymore. As for who--I'm Martha Waters. Most people just call me Martha. What were your other questions?" "When and how." "When?--Oh! It's May 2, 2050. As for how....I was hoping you could tell me that." Jayhawk described finding herself alone on the hillside, her long delerious walk to the house of the waterwheel. Martha frowned, asked several questions about exactly which mountain it had been, found that Jayhawk had no idea. "Very strange," she said, shaking her head. "And what do you remember before that?" Jayhawk bit her lip. She certainly didn't want to describe the attack on the Hidden Fortress to this woman, whoever or whatever she was. It might still all be stimsense, unpalatable though that thought was. Probably had to be stimsense. May 2 was the date of the attack on the Hidden Fortress, and Martha claimed that she'd been unconsious for four days--those numbers just didn't add up. "I was running the Matrix," she said, "with a--a friend, and I got separated from him for a moment. There was an odd...a kind of explosion, and that's all I remember." "You're a Matrix runner?" said Martha with interest. "What a small world it is. So am I. What's your address and handle? What's your name, for that matter?" "Caroline," said Jayhawk uncomfortably, guessing that the handle might be the more revealing. "I don't exactly have an address right now, I got fired from my job." "Well, Caroline, they must be pretty advanced technically up there in Seattle, if you can run the Matrix without even a datajack. What do they use? Induction rig?" Jayhawk put an instinctive hand to the side of her head, where she'd carried a standard I/O jack since the age of sixteen. Her probing fingers met smooth skin and long hair--longer than it ought to be, she realized suddenly, nearly halfway down her back. With a cry, she clamped both hands to her head, spilling hot soup into her lap. "Hey!" said Martha. "Be careful, you'll hurt yourself! What's the matter, child?" "Stimsense," Jayhawk snarled at her, "you're just another damn stimsense illusion. You and your soup too." She blotted ineffectually at her lap with the corner of the blanket. "Let me assure you, I'm real. Martha@relay3.pnet.ecuador.sa." "LTG34-123923," said Jayhawk promptly. "So you do know the Matrix, or at least the jargon. What's the matter with you, girl? You're frightening me. You don't look like an eco- guerrilla, but--" "Do I look dangerous?" said Jayhawk with a bitter laugh. "No, you don't. Now, why don't you tell me what's wrong?" "What's more likely--that someone would kidnap me in Seattle, take away my *datajack*, bring me all the way to Ecuador and leave me on a hill in a dress that isn't even mine--or that this is all stimsense?" "It does sound very improbable," Martha admitted, "but I promise you I'm no illusion. Perhaps you need more rest. Finish up what's left of that soup, and then you can sleep--and so can I. I've been sitting up late, looking after you." "Thanks," said Jayhawk absently, still running her hands through her hair in abstracted horror. No datajack? Who would do that, why would anyone want to? Church of the Purity? That was crazy, it would take magic, strong magic, to heal her so quickly. Martha got up, went to the door. Back over her shoulder, she said, "If you're a decker, what's your handle, anyway?" "Jayhawk," she said defiantly, and drained the last of the soup. Aliantha must know already, what difference did it make? Perhaps Martha's eyes widened, just a trace; but she said nothing, only left the room, closing the door softly behind her. Jayhawk got up, searched the room as well as she could. The door was locked, beyond her abilities without tools. The curtain on one wall concealed a vidscreen and telecom cabinet, but it was rigged only for datajack or voice input, and her voice evoked no response. "Stimsense," she said out loud in fury, and sat down on the bed again. It was seductively soft, after--how long? After weeks spent sleeping on the ground. She curled up among the damp blankets and was instantly asleep. -- Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@enzyme.berkeley.edu Article 29026 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!think.com!linus!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (8) Message-ID: <1990Dec12.212204.28967@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 12 Dec 90 21:22:04 GMT Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator) Organization: University of California Lines: 136 (8) Doc Jayhawk woke to find herself unable to move, her arms and legs held gently but firmly by what felt like padded clamps. She struggled against them, a knot of panic in her stomach, heard a male voice exclaim, "Easy now! You'll injure yourself. Lie still and I'll undo those." Bending over her was a face that would have been ludicrously humorous if she hadn't been so frightened: round as a ball, just a tuft of greying hair to break the line of his head, with wide round genial eyes and a small, almost pouting mouth. He smiled at her, revealing that his mouth wasn't so small after all, and did something out of her line of sight. The grip on her limbs relaxed; she sat up abruptly, gasped as the world swam around her. He put one hand on her shoulder, steadied her gently, then let go. She was in a small room, wood panelling on the walls, lying on what seemed to be a hospital bed. The entire wall behind her was covered with electronic equipment, monitors and panels of lights; one screen displayed a fast but regular trace that matched the heartbeat pounding in her ears. She was linked to the monitors by a long, flexible data- line--remembering, she put a hand quickly to her head, felt the familiar bump of the datajack, and another, unfamiliar port behind it to which the dataline was connected. The round-headed man stepped back, looked her over carefully. He was wearing a white lab coat, some kind of device clipped to its belt. "How do you feel?" he said. "The integration seems to be progressing very nicely; you're quite resilient." "Confused," said Jayhawk. "Where am I? What's happened?" "Gate Station Three," said the other. "We found you in the Gate. But I'm sure Martha will explain all that. I have some tests to run, if you'll excuse me--?" Without waiting for her answer, he turned to the impressive panels of machinery. "They call me Doc around here, by the way, though my name's Alex. What's yours?" "Caroline." The panel readouts were in Spanish, Jayhawk discovered, but there was enough technical material that she could make a guess at the meaning. He wasn't looking at the biomonitors--readouts leaped with feedback as she glanced at them--he was checking cyberware status. Still sitting on the bed, she peered over his shoulder, trying to learn what she could. She was in Montaigne Paradisio, she felt certain. Through a Gate. In the hands of the enemy, in the worst possible way. She'd need any edge she could get. Doc ran the readouts too fast for her tenuous grip on the nomenclature, humming softly to himself. "Very good," he said to her with a wide smile. "You're recovering very nicely. Though that body-image...hm." He stepped back, curved one hand in an arcane symbol, murmured a string of words far too foreign for her hearing. Jayhawk cringed back, nails biting into her palms, steeling herself to resist the magic. She felt nothing. Doc stood still, eyes closed, face expressionless in the play of light from the monitors. The only sound was the racing of her heart, echoed in the soft whisper of electronics. Wildly she contemplated trying to strangle him, make her escape. Ridiculous. Even if she could overcome him, she was doubtless in the heart of the enemy stronghold. There was no way she was going to fight her way out in-- she glanced down, found that she was wearing a clean white dress like the one she'd had on the hill. There were no scratches on her bare feet, no blisters. Doc opened his eyes, smiled once more. Jayhawk fought to keep from snarling in response, finding his cheerfulness more disturbing than active hostility would have been. "You can unplug that now, if you like. If you need anything, simply speak into the air and it will arrive. I'd suggest you rest; you're not entirely well yet, though you're doing very well indeed." He turned as if to go. "What are you going to do with me?" Jayhawk spat out. He turned back, fuzzy eyebrows raised in little v's of surprise. "I'm sure Martha will explain everything to you soon. You've been given to her, she's the one responsible for that. Right now all we want is for you to take care of yourself and stay in good shape. And if you notice anything odd, any mood swings or anything like that, please let me know at once. You seem to be making an excellent adaptation, but there's no sense in taking chances with your health." He walked across the room, stepped before a wall panel. It swung down to reveal a small sink. With neat deliberate motions, he began stripping the skin off his hands--gloves, Jayhawk realized after an instant's shock. The flesh beneath *looked* skinned; crimson and raw, with glints of steel showing through the white of fascia. He dropped the gloves into the drain, washed his hands carefully, then took out another pair from the cupboard beneath and put them on. She watched in horrified fascination. With a final smile, he walked out, the door opening silently before him and closing behind. She reached up, unplugged the dataline from her head. The jack was non- standard, from the look of the connector. The monitors behind her jumped, went dead; then after a few seconds resumed. A little observation showed that the heartbeat being displayed was still her own. She looked about the room for sensors, found none; but many things could have been hidden in the wall panels which had swallowed up the sink. A quick search showed that the outside door was locked. There were three rooms within her little prison: the room with the bed, a steamroom, and a palatial bathroom. The bathtub was the size of a sauna. She found an electric razor in the bathroom, took it apart with fingernails and determination. There were three small round blades inside. After a little thought, she wrapped them in toilet paper, tucked them into her bra. Then she went back to the main room, considered the wall monitors. He hadn't seemed to turn anything off, which meant if he could access her headware, so could she. She reconnected the dataline, noted the flickering jump in the monitors, started trying simple commands on the panels. Everything was in Spanish, and she recognized no brand names; but a good deal was apparent from the technical readouts. Response-increase wiring. Memory, MCPC chips, I/O link. Display link. Program enabler. And some- thing that extended through her right arm, some type of I/O--she looked down from the display in puzzlement, flexed her hand. Three thin metal prongs appeared suddenly from nearly invisible slits in the center of her palm. She stared at them uneasily until they retracted. Program carrier. She was wired to run the Matrix naked, without a deck, as Duende did. Montaigne Paradisio must be looking for another decker agent. After all, they'd lost Duende, hadn't they? Readouts danced on the wall above her, translating her fear into the clean cold traces of EEG and cardiogram. -- Mary Kuhner 12/12/90 Article 29170 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!mcnc!gatech!ncar!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!usc!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!apple!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk Message-ID: <1990Dec15.032028.26916@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 15 Dec 90 03:20:28 GMT Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator) Organization: University of California Lines: 147 I have been asked not to put the part number in the subject line. We will see if this generates more or fewer complaints. -- (9) Gates Jayhawk was lying face-down on the bed, eyes closed, hard at work. She had discovered that her new wiring was sufficient to let her program directly into headware memory, and was in the process of constructing a primative operating system, step by painful step, from the diagnostic code that was the memory's only current inhabitant. It was hard, hard enough to keep her from thinking about her situation for sometimes half an hour at a stretch. She started violently when a friendly female voice said "Hello? Are you all right?" It was Martha--or at least that was her first impression. But a rather smaller Martha, still wide-hipped and broad-shouldered but not nearly as massive. Her straight black hair was tied back, and she wore a simple brown poncho over loose cotton slacks. "Hello," said Jayhawk cautiously, sitting up. "I'm Martha Waters," said the other. "And you're Caroline, is that right? What's your handle?" There was no hint in her expression that they had had this conversation before. Stimsense? Jayhawk wondered. Well, if they expected her to love this woman on sight on account of being rescued from the forest--the hell with them. "Jayhawk at Osiris. Where am I? What's happened?" She scooted over to make room on the bed, but Martha remained standing. "We found you," she said gently. "In the Gate. Apparently you came along with one of Megan's transmissions--we're still trying to decypher it. That girl never would use normal channels." "Megan?" "Oh, sorry. You would probably know her as Aliantha. That's what most people call her. We're all rather concerned about her--after that transmission, we haven't heard anything from her at all. And it was a rather irregular one. You wouldn't know anything about that, would you?" Jayhawk shook her head, couldn't resist adding innocently, "Maybe something happened to her." "It could be. In any case, you arrived...." She looked hard at Jayhawk, as if judging her capacity to take the news. "Apparently something had happened to your body, as all we received was datastream. So we've had to reconstruct. I'm very glad to see that you're recovering so well. We were quite worried." Jayhawk licked her lips, said slowly, "You're saying that I'm dead." "No, no, you certainly are not." "That I was dead." "Not that exactly either. It's as if--as if you'd been on the Matrix, and lost your way back to your body. And then it was destroyed. But you're very much alive. You were fortunate. Megan sent quite detailed instructions on what we were to do with you--I imagine you've already found out about that. I'm sure you'll be eager to try our your new abilities as soon as you're fully recovered." Cold certainty struck Jayhawk all at once, and behind her the monitors leaped and danced with terror. Not an agent at all. Duende had gone on with the attack on the Hidden Fortress, and *he had killed the High Priestess*. She was to be Aliantha's host. Martha was staring at her in concern. She took a deep breath, tried to steady herself, listening to the feedback from behind. "So, what are you to...do with me?" "We're still decyphering parts of the message," said Martha. "And I would very much like to know what's happened in Seattle. You're sure you don't remember? Nothing at all?" "Nothing." She was not going to mention the endless nightmare of forest. She had no idea whether it had significance, but why give the enemy anything? "What's the last thing you recall?" "I was running the Matrix, got separated from a friend for a minute...then a kind of pop, and nothing after that. Crashed, probably." "Hm. Well, Shamrock will be here in a couple of days, and he should be able to give us a full report. In the meantime, you should consider yourself our guest. When you're a little stronger, you and I can take a jaunt on the local Matrix, maybe go out in the real world too. There's some very pretty countryside around here." Jay cringed involuntarily: Martha raised her eyebrows, said, "What's wrong?" "I'm, um, not really an outdoors person." "Well enough, then. If you need anything, just speak aloud and it'll be delivered. We've got UN Library access, anything you could possibly want. You're welcome to go out, too, though you'll have an escort--there are a few rather dangerous places in this complex. His name's Slim, I'm sure you'll like...ah, well, you'll get along with him all right, he's not a bad sort. If you're having any troubles, please let Doc or me know. We really were very concerned for you, it must have been a terrible trip.--But that's all behind us now." She smiled, nodded her massive head in Jay's direction, and departed. Jayhawk stared at the closed door, her fingernails biting into her palms. The middle finger of her right hand met a sharp, unexpected prong of steel--hastily she uncurled her hand, stared at the program carrier. Hundreds of thousands of nuyen worth, her cyberware. So that Aliantha could have a well-furnished new habitation? With a program carrier and a few hundred megapulses of code she could duplicate Kurt's trick, cast her mind loose into the embrace of the machine, assuming they ever really let her jack in. More code than even her expanded headware could hold, unless she was spectacularly successful at refining their first crude attempts. She'd need storage to link into, a machine to use as a surrogate deck. Inside the computer, she might possibly be able to do...something. The Paradisians seemed to have an affinity for self-destruct codes. Or perhaps she could get a message to her friends. A warning, if nothing else. *It will not be me who returns to you. Beware.* But the risk...she didn't want to put their innovation, the best work she and Kurt had ever done, into the hands of the Paradisians. Not that it wouldn't be anyway, when Aliantha owned her, body and mind. For all she didn't want to credit that theory, it was inescapable. High Priests don't die. Duende had never spoken of Aliantha as dead, even after the dramatic fight in the True World. And he'd been right. If nothing else, perhaps she could lose her mind so thoroughly into the machine that they wouldn't be able to call her back. It was the only kind of suicide that seemed to promise anything. If they could recon- struct her from datastream....Physical death would only slow them down. No escape that way. She buried her head in her hands, fingers curled protectively over the unfamiliar double datajacks. Who are you kidding, Jayhawk? No escape at all. -- Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@enzyme.berkeley.edu Article 29175 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!apple!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk Message-ID: <1990Dec15.044629.1596@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 15 Dec 90 04:46:29 GMT Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator) Organization: University of California Lines: 84 I have been asked not to put the part number in the subject line. This is part 10. -- (10) Chalker May 8, 2050. 2:30 AM. Redmond Barrens, Seattle. There was still a trace of ash on the ground, remnant of the fire that had gutted the building to a few stumps of wall. It clung uncomfortably to Julia's hands where she sat with Duende, watching Ratty conjure. A face formed out of the night's darkness, a middle-aged man with stark angular features framing eyes darker than the night. There was no body, only a beating heart dangling by the tether of the major artery from the neck. Blood oozed from it in rhythm to its pulsing, the slow clotting flow of something near death. It made no impression on the ash below. She had never seen Chalker in life, could not imagine what the man must have looked like. Ratty threw back his head, looked up at the ghost. "I come," he whispered, "to speak to you of vengeance." "You have done well," it replied. Its voice had no expression at all, empty as the echo of wind across the broken walls. "We are eager to see the end." There was nothing of eagerness in it, nothing so human. "I have three questions," said the shaman. It seemed to Julia that he was neither frightened or repulsed by the sight before him; saddened, rather, like someone meeting an old friend now ravaged by age or disease. "The last two people I have promised to destroy are not in Seattle. Is there any message I could send to them, any word from you which would lure them here?" "They will not come," said the ghost. "Not in the flesh, not in a form that we can harm. There is no message you could send that would make them do that." Ratty bowed his head, let out a deep breath. "Then we must take the fight to them. So my second question is: We need to know about Gates, to get into the High Temple. Who among the dead, who that I can reach, has that knowledge? And my third: Who among them would know what it is that Montaigne Paradisio will do at Highsummer, what they plan?" "High Priestess Aliantha," the ghost whispered, "if you dare to call her. She has what you seek." "She is dead then?" said Duende curiously. Julia cursed him for his fearlessness. His voice was terribly loud in the stillness. "Neither living nor dead." Her own heartbeat echoed in her ears. It wanted to synchronize with the slow relentless rhythm of Chalker's; but she was too much afraid. "How can I call on her shade?" said Ratty. "I have no link to her, no blood or bone. And the place she died is outside Seattle, out of my reach." "Search for something she cared about deeply, something she created, even a place she frequented. It will be enough." Duende was smiling, Julia realized with a start, a smile of feral joy that she had never seen from him. When Ratty glanced back at him he nodded once, sharply. Ratty rose, bowed to the ghost. "I am well answered." The image did not fade away, like the ghosts on tridee; Julia blinked and it was gone, like an illusion of her tired eyes dispelled by the motion. The ruins were intensely quiet. Outside the circle of Yoichi's flares the ghouls must be waiting, but it was as if even they waited in silence, fearing. "We should go," said Ratty softly. "This is no place for the living." He reached for her hand. Briefly she saw him as she had on their first meeting, a shadow from the lands of death, inhuman eyes reflecting the deepest fears of her heart. She fought with herself, held out her hand; at his touch the vision broke, leaving her trembling. -- Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@enzyme.berkeley.edu Article 29628 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 11 Message-ID: <1990Dec31.042422.13749@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 31 Dec 90 04:24:22 GMT Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator) Organization: University of California Lines: 54 [The consensus of the email I got is that the episode numbers should be included. I'm sorry if this inconveniences some readers.] (11) Prayer Jayhawk woke with a knot in her belly as if she had been having nightmares, though she couldn't remember any; and a plan of sorts. She made a quick circuit of the room, found nothing she hadn't seen the previous day, and set to work. In the huge tub, she ran a hot bath, liberally scented with pine oil. The remembered grime of the forest was still bothering her, and a lingering revulsion at the thought of being handled by the Paradisians. She soaked for a long time, trying to collect her thoughts. The knots left her stomach, and her body, at least, felt better for it. When she felt thoroughly clean, she put on a terrycloth robe--the only clothing she could find, besides the white dress she had been wearing-- and sat cross-legged on the bed. For a while she watched the flicker of the EEG and heartbeat monitors, trying to slow them by feedback; then she closed her eyes against even that distraction. She was trying to call up the image of the Spider, as she had seen it: covered with shimmering lights like a map of the dataflow beneath its coarse black pelt, clustered black eyes each holding a spark of piercing brightness. No one but Yoichi had shared her vision, that it was beautiful as well as terrible; Channa and Casey had only been afraid. --Spider!--she said silently, unwilling to give anything to the hidden listeners.--I know you spirits don't talk to people like me, you have your own shamans or whatever for that. But your chosen one, the one you set to finding you a student, he said I had the gift you wanted, or a little of it anyway. Get me out of here, help me escape, and I'll do what you want. Run the Matrix for you, whatever. Be a magician, if that's how it works. Please. Just get me out of here.-- For a long moment she waited, her chest tight with tension. Nothing happened. She let out a long breath, swore aloud. "Stupid, Jayhawk. What did you expect?" She stretched out on the bed, returned to her programming. With the operating system, such as it was, up and running, she was ready to begin constructing the code that would allow her to duplicate Kurt's trick, insinuate her consciousness into the workings of the computer. She began with a latticework of support code, nothing that would reveal her plans if examined--the skeleton of the structure she would build, no flesh on it yet. Written, tested, debugged. She applied herself to the problem with determination and concentration. It was enough to distract her from her situation for nearly four hours. -- Mary Kuhner 12/30/90 Article 29671 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 12 Message-ID: <1991Jan2.055436.10300@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 2 Jan 91 05:54:36 GMT Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator) Organization: University of California Lines: 165 (12) Slim When Jayhawk couldn't stand her captivity any longer, she demanded clothes from the listening air, found drawers opening from walls that had appeared blank. She dressed in the first outfit she found, summer clothes, a red blouse and loose brown pants: then approached the door, nervously. The palm-plate opened at her touch without a sound. Just outside stood a flayed man, denim overalls over raw, glistening red flesh knitted together with cloudy strips of fascia, bits of glittering silver wire. His face was shadowed by a broad-brimmed Stetson hat. "Howdy, ma'am," he said with a Texan drawl; she caught a glimpse of white teeth in a lipless mouth, muscles bunched around it. "I'm Slim." "Yeek!" said Jayhawk, stepping back involuntarily. She fought to control herself, determined not to show fear to the enemy. "Um--hello. I'm Jayhawk." She forced herself to look at him, confirmed her initial impression. No skin at all. "I, um, wanted to go for a walk." "Glad to see you're feeling better," said Slim affably, stepping aside to let her pass. "We were getting a mite worried about you--quite an accident you had. Doc'll be glad to hear you're up and about. He wants us to take extra good care of you. Where'd you like to go?" "Just walk, for now." She walked briskly past him, hesitated just an instant, then turned right. There was no point at all, she reflected, in letting the enemy chose her direction. "I need to stretch my legs a bit." Bare metal corridors, meeting at right angles, endless and identical. At intervals, identical unmarked doors, all closed. She walked for nearly half an hour, constructing a crude map in headware memory. There were no signs of other people anywhere, no sound, nothing to break the monotony. The air smelled antiseptic and dead. At last she turned to Slim, said with false cheerfulness, "It's a big place, isn't it? So what's interesting around here? What's to see?" A moist glimmer peered out from under his hat, all she could see or wanted to see of his eyes, shadowed from the harsh overhead lighting. "What's your interest?" "Um--computer room? Library? Gardens, or something like that? Mess hall?" He considered that for a moment, flesh shifting slowly across the whitish bulge of his adam's apple as if he were chewing on an idea. "I can show you Data Control Central," he ventured. "That would be great," said Jayhawk, almost warmly, though she did not like having to follow him. There were spaces between his muscles that she could have slipped a finger into, metal beneath. A good deal of metal. No expert in bodyware, she could not guess what it was even with such a revealing view. After some ten minutes' walk Slim stopped in front of one of the unmarked doors, palmed it open. The room within was the size of a gymnasium, brightly lit and completely bare. She took a few steps in, stared around in puzzlement. Not even an electrical outlet broke the smooth walls. She closed her eyes, listened. No hum of machinery, only the echo of her own breathing, sudden soft footsteps from behind--hastily she opened her eyes, turned to face Slim. "Not much to look at, is there?" He frowned, muscles knotting across his face. "Beg pardon, ma'am?" "Where are the computers? In the walls?" His frown deepened, the tendons in his forehead parting; she didn't try too hard to see what was beneath them. "Are you sure you're feeling all right, ma'am? Doc would be awful upset if you got overtired. We all try to keep on Doc's good side." Jayhawk choked back a sudden horrified giggle. You don't want to get on Doc's bad side, no you don't, he'll flay the skin right off your body.... "Tell me what *you* see." There was a long silence. "Ma'am," he said at last, "they tell me there's a storm coming. Best we be getting out of here." At her nod, he led her out. "Where else? I know, gardens. If you're not too tired--?" They walked a good distance, nearly back to the origin of her crude map, until Slim stopped abruptly before a featureless wall. At his touch it irised open, revealing a grassy lawn, what appeared to be trees a kilo- meter or more away. Jayhawk stepped out onto the grassy, felt the sun strike her with tropical intensity. "Is it real?" she asked a little sarcastically. "Will it sunburn?" "Are you *sure* you're feeling all right, ma'am?" At her snort he went on, sounding a little hurt, "Do you usually sunburn? If so, I reckon it'll burn you all right." "I thought it might be artificial." She took a few more steps, turned to look at the building from which they had come, stood staring in wonder. A pyramid, a single structure half again the size of Aztechnology, polished tawny stone bright in the sunlight. Its face was stepped, each step a meter high--thousands of them, blurring into the distance. There might have been some structure at its top, nearly beyond her sight. "I don't advise you climb up," Slim drawled. "There's a storm up top. Specially dangerous for you, you aren't protected yet." "I wasn't planning to." Even in her best condition--and the ache in her legs suggested she was nowhere near that--she could never have climbed a kilometer of stairs. "Um, is it dangerous?" There were no clouds in the luminously blue sky. "Should we go in?" "It's more dangerous inside. More concentrated," he went on at her inquiring look. "Don't you worry, ma'am, I'm keeping an eye out." She walked a little further, fighting an irrational urge to run off toward the distant trees. Slim hesitated in the doorway, followed her with visible reluctance. "Can I get you anything, ma'am? A sunshade, maybe?" He glanced up briefly. "I'm not over fond of sunshine myself, I burn something terrible." "I imagine so," said Jayhawk, caught between sympathy and horror. "Would you rather go back?" "There's a storm in the way right now, ma'am. Give it ten minutes or so to clear out. I'll be all right, thanks. That's what the hat's for." He touched its broad brim. "Just a habit." "Isn't it awkward working with all these...storms?" She sat down on the grass, finding herself suddenly tired. "Not really. You get to have a feel for them." "But if you're working on something--" "Do it in a shielded room if it can't be interrupted, that's all. Would you like something to drink? Thought I might have a drop myself." "Soda," said Jayhawk indifferently. Slim ducked back into the building, vanished. In his absence, the impulse to flee returned redoubled. A stupid impulse. She had a transmitting radio in her head. And even without that, even assuming Slim couldn't catch up with her--she winced at the thought--where would she be? In the *woods*. Better to run the other way, find if a 'storm' could kill her in a way the Paradisians couldn't recover. But she felt no impulse at all to try that. She'd never been suicidal. Slim reappeared with two glasses, offered her one. The liquid looked like water, tasted like some unfamiliar fruit. She lingered over it, tried to ask Slim questions. He professed not to know the date, nor their location, though he told her that it was late afternoon, which meant that the mountains on the edge of vision must be to the west. (With a small satisfaction she added a compass arrow to her map.) "Storm's gone," he said after a while. "Ready to go back?" She was pleased to find that her map was correct, at least in its directions-- she'd had to guess at scale, but it wasn't off by too much. Slim opened the door for her, nodded politely, wished her a good day, and was gone. She flung herself on the bed, shivering despite the lingering sun-warmth. Her own skin crawled in sympathetic reaction. She'd thought herself blase about cyberware and its attendant inhumanities, but this....She could almost share Channa's revulsion at the concept. She tried not to imagine what might be planned for her. -- Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@enzyme.berkeley.edu Article 30034 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!apple!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 13 Message-ID: <1991Jan11.150450.19938@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 11 Jan 91 15:04:50 GMT Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator) Organization: University of California Lines: 98 Jayhawk dreamed that night, a dream of memory, crisp and clear as if stored in circuitry; and woke disoriented, imagining for a moment that she was back in Seattle. For a long time she lay curled in a tight ball, wishing she could go back to sleep, could manage even that false escape. It was impossible. At last she gave up, went back to her coding. Her dream was of the night they'd destroyed Cavilard Base, nine desperate people against the largest Paradisian installation in Seattle, and were sitting in a parking lot planning their strike against the last and worst of the survivors, High Priestess Aliantha and her attendant sorcerors. Ratty was sitting alone on the pavement weaving a summoning, trying to call up aid for the fight they anticipated. Jayhawk watched him idly, expecting to see nothing, or at most a shiver in the air. The air shivered, shimmered, and a creature stepped out of the night, stood regarding Ratty. A spider nearly the size of their station wagon, its impossible bulk limned with a tracery of shifting green light, an ever-changing pattern flowing beneath the coarse black hairs that covered it. Smaller, it might have been called a wolf spider; it had the long legs of a hunter, knobbed joints towering far above Ratty's head. All conversation in the car came to an abrupt halt, seven faces pressed against the glass. Clusters of eyes, black tipped with sparks of crimson, probed into theirs, bent toward Ratty. He looked up at it, did not move. "What do you ask of me?" it said conversationally, a cool, vaguely sardonic voice with a distinct Seattle accent. "Help against my enemies, against the High Priestess," said Ratty in a voice she could barely hear. "And what will you give me in return?" This seemed to dismay the shaman. It went on, "I make an offer: for every life I take for you, I will take one for myself." "I can't let you kill my people, I would be no better than my enemy." "I do not mean to kill them. That would be wasteful." Ratty considered that, while the rest of the team held its collective breath, waiting. "I don't have the right," he said at last. "I can't give away people like that; they're not mine to give." "I will promise to spare you and your friends." "No. No. I can't do this." "Then may I have leave to go?" It turned a little, feather-light for all its bulk, seemed about to walk off. Its legs pivoted with the grace of a fine machine. Ratty raised one hand, made a convulsive clutching gesture. "Wait. I will make an offer, I will....if you will aid us, I will search for a student for you, someone to willingly accept your power and do your work in this world. Is that what you want?" It turned, stood almost over him, dwarfing his slim form. "And you will do this within three months, or else I will take you instead. Yes?" "What should I tell the one I choose, what will become of him?" Ratty whispered. "Do you wish to become my initiate? No? Then it is no concern of yours. He will share my power and my knowledge, and he will understand it. And I will help you against your enemy." Lights traced and shifted across its body, like a map of the dataflow, the endless dance of the Matrix. Jayhawk stared at it, caught between admiration and terror. It was beautiful, the most beautiful creature she had ever seen. She could barely breathe, afraid to attract its attention to her. And yet she didn't want it to go. "How will I know," said Ratty at last, "who is suitable?" "You will know them when you see them," said the Spider; though it had no face to show an expression, she thought she detected amusement in its eyes. It glanced up at them once more--at her, she thought, and would have drawn back if she could, hid from that probing many-eyed gaze--back down at Ratty. "Are we agreed? Yes?" "Yes." As if dismissed by his words, the Spider turned away, walked off in a direction that her eyes would follow only for a brief, offended instant. The night seemed very dark where it had been, and very still. The crickets had stopped. "All right," said Duende after a moment. "Are we ready, then? Let's go." -- Mary Kuhner 1/7/91 mkkuhner@enzyme.berkeley.edu After 15 January: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu Article 31467 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!van-bc!ubc-cs!uw-beaver!milton!evolution!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@evolution.u.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 14 Message-ID: <15674@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 2 Feb 91 22:28:47 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu Reply-To: mkkuhner@evolution.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 214 14. Exercise Jayhawk was startled by a buzz, so much like her apartment doorbell that she automatically said "Come in." The door whisked open, and Martha peered in. "Hello!" she said. "Feel up to a little exercise?" "Hello," said Jayhawk coolly. "I suppose so. Let me get dressed." She gathered up an armload of clothes, retreated into the bathroom. "How are you doing? Need anything?" "Fine.--Is there any, ah, news from Seattle?" Martha frowned. "Not really. But don't worry yourself about that." "I'm just curious," said Jayhawk as civilly as she could manage, re- membering that she was not positive Martha knew her for an enemy. "You said you were waiting to hear something." "Ah. Shamrock said he'd talked to your friends, they were fine....and the people who'd been sent to, ah, talk to them have apparently been called back. Nothing to worry about there." "Ha!" Jay said, almost with relief. "You do know who I am, then." The furrow between Martha's brows deepened. "Of course we do. I explained all this, didn't you understand? It was all in the message- squirt that came with you." "I thought you hadn't entirely figured that out." "Not entirely, not yet. But the part dealing with you was really very clear." Martha smiled brightly. "Is there anywhere in particular you would like to go?" When Jay shook her head, she went on, "I know-- exercise. We need to get you started on some kind of program. Can't have you sitting around all day, it's not good for you." Unwillingly, Jayhawk followed her through the featureless corridors to an equally featureless room. "Parallel bars!" said Martha, gesturing, and a floor panel slid back to reveal a pair of chest- high, polished wooden bars. With surprising ease given her bulk, Martha hoisted herself up onto them, arm-walked from one end to the other. "There. Now you try." Jayhawk managed a lurching progress about halfway across, dropped to the floor with a snarl. "I don't do exercise," she said. "Not since elementary school--" "High time you got back to it, then. You need to be healthy. Sitting around at a desk all day will not do at all." "--And the person who made me do it then was awfully sorry." It was a lie. She'd never taken the long-plotted revenge, though she wished now that she had. She folded her arms defiantly, back against the wall. "If you have to teach me--" A glimmer of real curiosity that she fought to keep out of her voice, but didn't quite succeed "--why not something useful, like the Matrix?" "First things first. You need to be in good shape for some of what we're going to be doing, especially the Overnet. A healthy mind, a healthy body, a healthy--" slight pause "--spirit." Jay wasn't sure whether it was the old hatred of forced exercise, or the new terror--a healthy body, a healthy host for Aliantha when she took over?--but she could not bring herself to cooperate. It was not the issue over which she'd have chosen to fight her captors, but...."I can't do it. Please. I can handle jogging, swimming, something that seems halfway real; but I can't stand exercise equipment, I never could." Martha opened her mouth to protest, seemed to think better of it, said apologetically, "I'm sorry, I didn't realize it was like that. How about jogging, then? We could go outside--no, I forgot, you hate the outdoors. In the halls, then. Would that be better?" "All right." It was a very small victory, but better than nothing. "I'm terrible at it, though, we won't be going very far." "Oh," said Martha with a smile, "I think you may surprise yourself." They ran through a maze of featureless corridors, filling in one blank after another on Jay's headware map. To her surprise, she didn't find herself noticably tired. "You're very healthy," Martha said when she commented on this. "Healthier than you've been in a long time, I think. Has Doc been to see you?" When Jay shook her head, she went on, "That's a good sign, actually; he's only interested when things go wrong. But so like him!" She pulled to a sudden stop, glanced backwards. "Um. How fast do you think you can run?" Before Jay could formulate an answer, she laughed, said, "Never mind then. I think we'd best hide out for a bit. There's a storm coming." With a palm-touch she opened one of the hundreds of identical doors, gestured inside. Jayhawk hesitated for a moment, looking backwards. She could see nothing unusual. The idea of bolting occured to her--into the "storm", probably to her death, but perhaps a death that would put her outside the Paradisian's reach....But Martha was faster, she told herself. It would never work. Martha took her elbow, and she allowed herself to be pulled inside. The room was full of heavy machinery. Martha called up benches, and they sat, catching their breath. "How do you know when a storm is coming?" "Something tells you," said Martha absently, apparently thinking about something else. "A prickly feeling? Something like that?" "Oh! No, you're actually told. It's the complex, as a matter of fact--once you have a direct link to it, it warns you about such things. It can also help a lot with the building itself, which as you may have noticed is something of a maze--and wait till you see a rearrangement, and have to learn the whole thing again! I don't bother anymore....It would like to meet you, Jay, but we've been fending it off; it can be rather, ah, over-eager with new people. Maybe soon. The direct link is extremely helpful." With an odd look at Jayhawk, she changed the subject. "I wrote some code that you probably still use at the University, some accounting packages. What were you working on?" "IC programming, mainly. Why did you give up being an accountant?" "Heavens, I wasn't an accountant, I just wrote the stuff. That was a long time ago, a lot of water under the bridge since then. Before the Matrix, even. Do you remember 'hackers'?" "I'm twenty-four years old," said Jayhawk with dignity, "I *was* a hacker, before the Matrix." Martha looked abashed. "I'm sorry, I didn't realize. You must have been quite young.--Most deckers don't seem to realize non-Matrix computing ever existed. It's nice to meet someone else with an appreciation for the history of the field." "What system did you work on?" Martha rattled off a familiar machine name--a dinosaur, but still in use, Jay'd broken into it once just to see what the ancient archetecture looked like--and said with approval, "It's good to see you taking an interest in things." "I'm a decker. Curiosity is a way of life." "A way of life. Just you remember that." At Jayhawk's puzzled look, she went on, "We didn't think you were going to make it for a while, we'd just about given up hope." Jay shivered, thinking of the endless forest, the fever delirium. She had decided that whatever that nightmarish experience had been, stimsense or delusion or some arcane reality, it coincided with Martha's statements about how near she had come to death. Martha said thoughtfully, "What you went through is very difficult, most people don't cope nearly as well as you did. The methods we had to use to recover you were rather, well, arcane. Couldn't deal with it myself. But you seem to be managing extremely nicely." "What usually goes wrong?" said Jayhawk with morbid curiosity. "I wouldn't say there was a 'usually'. It varies with the person, varies a good deal." "Okay, what's been known to go wrong?" Martha sighed. "Ah, well, there's cyberware rejection. That didn't seem too likely in your case. And then some people just can't adapt, and they go insane, or the integration breaks down....A number of things can happen." She stood up briskly. "The storm's gone, why don't we head on back?" Back at Jayhawk's room, she asked, "Do you need anything?" "Computer access!" said Jay fiercely. "Oh, you haven't found your terminal yet? Terminal!" When nothing happened, she frowned, stared at the wall for a moment. "It hasn't been set up yet. Let me see." She extended a hand to the wall, three fine metal prongs reaching out from her knuckles to mesh with a previously-invisible socket. Jayhawk's hands itched with the desire to hit her, now when she was distracted...a stupid idea, she told herself, and petty besides. There was no getting out that way. A terminal unfolded from the wall near the bed. "There you go! Everything should be set up. I'll see you tomorrow--until then, just ask if you need anything. Ah, you'll find that a lot of files have to be secured against you at the moment. I imagine you can get past that if you try, but I really wouldn't recommend it. There are some rather dangerous things on this system, things you're not ready for yet." Jayhawk stared after her with tightly clenched lips, then sat down abruptly at the terminal, logged on. There was a genererous little subdirectory at hand, with her name on it; a quick investigation showed that it was part of an enormous network, larger than anything the University boasted. Most of the files were scrambled in some way, meaningless to her. Everything she had put in her headware was filed neatly away in a branch of her directory tree. Experiment revealed that the file was constantly updated with anything she added, and that the link was two-way. A more thorough search revealed that it was also being echoed to at least three places in the system--perhaps more, if it were being encrypted during transmission. She leaned back, shook her head in wonder and dismay. "It's no wonder they go crazy," she said softly, aloud. "No wonder at all." Eventually she went back to work. After all, she'd known there was no secrecy; this only confirmed it. If she was to escape, she would have to pull off something so clever that they wouldn't understand it even though they saw every step. It seemed to her that if she ever stopped believing in the possibility of escape, she *would* go mad, on the spot. -- Mary Kuhner 2/2/91 Article 31468 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wuarchive!rice!uw-beaver!milton!evolution!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@evolution.u.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 15 Message-ID: <15675@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 2 Feb 91 22:30:01 GMT References: <15674@milton.u.washington.edu> Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu Reply-To: mkkuhner@evolution.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 102 15. Inside Despite having written all the necessary code, despite headware that checked out perfectly as far as she could tell, Jayhawk found that she couldn't get onto the Matrix. The program carrier in her palm would link her with her terminal, give her a virtual keyboard and screen to play with; but whenever she tried to go further, she was slapped back into her body with startling suddenness, ACCESS DENIED flaring across the inside of her eyelids. She couldn't figure out why. The frustration of her fourth or fifth attempt brought memories stirring to the surface, memories of a dream of frustration. She had been trapped in a tiny doorless room, aware of everything she wanted just outside, but unable to get at it. And then something approaching, something at once desireable and terrible....She couldn't remember any more, though she thought the dream had continued. She went back to her coding, surfaced from the near-trance of concentration half an hour later with a gasp of realization. "It would like to meet you," Martha had said. "We've been putting it off; it can be a bit over-eager with new people. Maybe soon." Her dreams were not her own. She swore aloud, spent the rest of the evening devising checks on the files that gave access from the mainframe to her headware memory. Checks within checks, so that a cursory inspection would find only the outermost. A weak safeguard, but the best she could do. That night the dream returned: trapped in a tiny featureless prison, all creation waiting for her outside. Something approached, slipped inside along the traceries of headware, began to meddle with the code she had written. She tried to deny it access, failed. Lines of text scrolled by her eyes, changing too quickly for her to follow. The intruder was *inside*, within her, making changes in her--she could feel it groping out into her arms, tugging at them, restructuring.... She woke in a cold sweat, arms wrapped defensively around her head. Is that how it's going to be, is that what's going to happen to me? Suddenly the headware link seemed invasive, a penetration of her being; she scrabbled at the datajack ineffectually, caught herself. With an effort of will, she forced herself to check the safeguards she had set. None of her files had been accessed. As far as she could tell, none of the headware code had been changed. A dream. Nothing but a dream, a nightmare--and who wouldn't have nightmares in a place like this? she told herself firmly, and went back to work. Apparently sensing her mood, Martha was less chatty during their morning jog; but at the end of it she said brightly, "Jayhawk, there's someone who would very much like to meet you. Is that all right?" "Sure," she said with harsh defiance. "Any time." She was resolved not to show fear, empty though the gesture might be. "I'll try to set up an appointment for tomorrow, then. Have a nice day." That night she drove herself to stay awake, helped by the timeless constancy of the light. She tried the tricks Channa had taught her when the two of them were trying to disentangle the web of suggestions in Jay's mind, hoping to bring to light whatever was keeping her off the Matrix. She found nothing, though the forbidding was just as obtrusive as before. Memories pricked at her, times in the past when she'd been denied the Matrix for days or weeks. The craving was not bad yet, but it would be. She was an addict, had been for years. Morning crawled across her terminal clock, marked otherwise only by the accumulating clutter of coffeecups. Morning, and afternoon. Martha did not come. Toward evening she had to admit to herself that she was waiting for a knock on the door with as much impatience as fear, unable to bear the waiting any longer. She rubbed red-rimmed eyes, decided to lie down for just a little while....drifted off while wrestling with a detail of code, one more line in the escape plan. She woke with a cry, sat up bolt upright, hands clutching her head. A sharp stab of pain made her draw back. The program carrier in her palm was fully extended, a smear of blood from her face on the thin metal prongs. She shook her hand violently, willed it to retract. The dreams had returned, clearer and more vivid. An intruder within, modifying and revising--not her physical form, nothing so trivial, but her thoughts, the very structure and layout of her mind, the system under which it operated. She'd been helpless, little more than a spectator. And then another presence had joined it, working at the same tasks, but not quite cooperatively--she had dizzying memories of the two successively adjusting and readjusting.... She climbed painfully out of bed, stripped off her clothes and left them in a pile on the floor, and stood under a scalding hot shower. It helped a little, drove back some of the shivering. Silently, face tipped up into the blinding spray of hot water, she said: Spider, if you're really out there, if you're really listening, you had better do something soon. Because I'm going to go crazy if they keep me here much longer. I don't think I'll do you much good like that. There was no answer at all. -- Mary Kuhner 2/2/91 Article 31679 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!dali.cs.montana.edu!milton!evolution!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@evolution.u.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 16 Message-ID: <15890@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 6 Feb 91 00:41:30 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu Reply-To: mkkuhner@evolution.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 350 [This one is particularly dedicated to the GM, Jon Yamato, who stayed up until 2:30 AM so that I could see what happened next....] 16. Bikes After the nightmares Jayhawk slept only fitfully; when the door buzzed she was awake at once, though painfully groggy. "Come in." "Hi, sleepyhead! Want to go for a ride?" Martha looked at her, frowned. "Are you feeling all right?" "I, uh, I'm not quite used to not having a window, and I think I stayed up too late." She smoothed her nightgown awkwardly. "If you could give me ten minutes or so to get dressed and freshen up--?" "May I see your wrist, please? No, the other one," when Jayhawk instinctively extended her left arm, unwilling to expose the program carrier. Martha wrapped her fingers gently around Jay's wrist, closed her eyes; Jayhawk tensed, but could sense nothing. After a few seconds Martha let go, looked up. "Nothing's wrong as far as I can tell. How does a bike ride sound to you? I can wait in the hall while you get dressed." Ten minutes later they were jogging through the featureless corridors. "Missed you yesterday," said Jay, the most indirect approach she could find to asking Martha what was going on. "I'm sorry about that. Other business. I hope you weren't too bored?" "Maybe you've forgotten, here, but out in the real world most people who run the Matrix for a living are addicted to it." "I know," said Martha uncomfortably. "But we can't let you loose on the Matrix until you've a little more fit. Today should be a good test." "Of what?" "Of how well you interact with the machine, how well your cyberware is functioning...." "Oh!" She had almost forgotten what the medical monitors had shown here, the complex traceries of the vehicle rig woven through her nerves. Her bare room provided no way to test those abilities. They turned down a corridor which did not appear on her map, entered a huge open bay. It could easily have accomodated a full-sized airplane, though at the moment it held nothing more than a pair of motorcycles. Martha gestured at them. "Go ahead, pick one." Jayhawk arbitrarily chose the left bike, looked it over carefully. There was some extra machinery around the rear wheel, and an unfamiliar panel at the front; otherwise it was not much different from her long-lost Rapier. "Good choice," said Martha. "That's Brown." She straddled the other bike. "Go ahead--jack in, see how it feels." A small port on the handlebar seemed designed to take the program carrier's prongs; tentatively she extended them, made the connection. There was a brief, soundless, dizzying explosion of sensation; she found herself sitting on the bike, vaguely aware of having run through a series of checks. It was a very odd feeling. She could sense her body, sense the bike, but both were distant, filtered as if through several levels of indirection. She felt as if she were floating in space, disembodied, manuvering body and bike through some kind of remote. "All right?" said Martha's voice in her ear. "How does it feel?" She struggled for a moment, discovered how to talk. "A little strange." "Strange? In what way? Describe what you're feeling, please." Martha's tone was unusually insistent. "It's a lot like running a security system from the Matrix. Aware, but detached. It's probably just habit--I've run security a number of times, but I've never done this before." She didn't believe that explanation herself, but she didn't want to tell Martha any more than she must. She tried to shift her weight, found something resisting her. It seemed unnatural to move her body separately, awkward; she was interfering with the bike's balance. But she could do it, with concentration. "Have you ever flown? No? Then we'll take it slow at first. Ready?" Martha wheeled forward; ahead of her, a door slid upwards. For a moment she was silhouetted against bright sky; then she vanished. Jayhawk moved forward, saw from her weirdly disembodied point of view that they were high up on the side of the pyramid, perhaps half a klick. A dizzyingly steep ramp plunged down toward the grassy lawn far below. It all seemed a little too distant to be really frightening. Before she had time to think about it, she was skimming downwards. There was no sensation of speed; it was more like playing a video game than being on a motorcycle. She found herself disappointed. Riggers she'd known had described the experience as comparable to sex or running the Matrix. This was nothing. Blocked! She was being blocked out of a full link with the bike, just as she had been blocked off the Matrix--and probably by the same mechanism, whatever that was. The ramp flared out a little at the base. Martha was already racing out across the lawn. For just an instant Jayhawk felt the speed at which she was moving, like a stone plummeting from the pyramid, felt the wheels spinning smoothly, the gyros adjusting to her weight. Then it was gone, leaving only vision. She gunned the bike after Martha, who plunged in among the trees, following an almost impossibly narrow path. It hardly seemed necessary to concentrate at all; the bike knew what it was doing, needed only her cooperation. Ignoring the trees streaming past, Jayhawk concentrated on her link with the machine, trying to break whatever barrier was keeping her out. The barrier was not quite adequate to its task; bits of sensation leaked through, the pulse of the engine, the level of charge in its capacitors, the wind in her hair. An instant of breakthrough, dizzying exultation of speed--and something reached back at her through the link, *into* her, trying to change-- She jerked her awareness forcibly back, almost disconnected from the bike--looked up to see trees whirling at her, realized that she would crash. In an instant of panic she brought the bike to a skidding stop, then tore her hand free and jumped off, backed away. The engine wound down to silence. Martha did a hasty reverse, rode back to her. "Jayhawk! What's the matter, are you all right?" Jay slid down against a tree, arms wrapped tightly around her. "Is that what was supposed to happen? Because if so, I don't think...I don't think I'm interested in having any part of it." "What's wrong? Tell me what happened." She looked up at Martha, terror and hatred naked in her eyes. "You're my enemy. I shouldn't tell you anything." Martha's eyes widened; she went on, regretting what she was saying but unable to stop herself, "Everything I tell you, every bit of cooperation I give you, is one more step in damning myself." In a voice thick with loathing, "You belong to the people who cut my boyfriend's heart out on an altar." Martha looked down as if unable to meet her eyes. "I'm sorry, Jayhawk. There are some truly loathsome people here. I'm sorry you ever had to get caught up in this, as I'm sorry for myself." "Is this how it was for you?" Curious despite herself. "Not exactly. I was out exploring, years ago, and I found something.... I'll tell you the whole story, when I can.--Jayhawk, I want you to survive. Whatever you may think of me, that's the truth." "Martha." The older woman looked up. "Tell me how I can die. If I know that...maybe I can go on living for a while." "Do you really have to know?" At Jay's nod she hesitated a moment, weighing her words. "It's really very simple. Ask Slim to kill you. He *will*; and you won't be recoverable." "Thank you," Jayhawk whispered. "But tell me, *please*, what is happening that is so dreadful." "Something is trying to get into my mind, change me. Just now: and I've sensed it before, in my dreams." "Here? Through the bike link?" Martha frowned. "What do you think it is? I know you have some idea." In an utterly toneless voice, Jayhawk said, "We had several indications that Aliantha had no body of her own. I believe that I am to be a host for her." Martha shook her head. "No. I don't think so. I saw the message she sent, and it didn't sound like that.--I taught Aliantha, Jayhawk. I know her. She has other choices, far more effective ones. Using a host body....The body image is never quite right, it never meshes perfectly. And that's catastrophic when doing anything...dangerous. I'm sorry, I'm not explaining this very well. The vocabulary--" "No, I understand you. What *did* she say to do with me?" Martha hesitated. "Part of the message was only for the Lord. But from what I saw, it sounded to me....High Priestess. Though I don't know of where." She wiped her hands on her pants, went on, "Possibly the complex itself has taken an interest in you. It is sometimes *much* too eager with new people." "That would have been my second guess." "I could check that, if you like." "Is 'who' really the important question?" said Jayhawk bitterly. "How can I stop it?" "What did you do to bring it on?" "I was trying to get around the override, whatever it is you've done to keep me off the Matrix." "I hoped you could break that. I didn't use any Overnet tricks at all." Martha smiled tentatively. "It's probably the only thing that's saving me. God, Martha, do you remember...do you still know what it is to be afraid? Some of them seem to have forgotten." She was thinking of Duende. "Oh yes. That's something that never goes away. For some of us here, that's all there is anymore." She looked at Jayhawk with concern. "I can check if you like, see if the complex is responsible for this... intrusion." "If you want." She buried her head in her arms. "Martha, could you try to arrange that...the meeting you mentioned? Maybe we can work something out. This sneaking in behind my back will not do." Her voice was not as brave as her words. Martha was silent for a long moment. "It says--not now, but tonight. And it denies any responsibility for what you say just happened." Jay nodded, not looking up. Martha hesistated, went on more softly, "We've quite a way from the complex, and it's actually fairly private here. There aren't many who have the power to monitor this place. A lot of us come out here sometimes, when we need to be alone....careful, of course, that we don't run into each other. It's something you should keep in mind. I want you to survive, Jayhawk, and I think you can. But you're going to have to work at it." "Should I? Isn't it my duty...to deny my enemy use of my talents?" "And not to learn what you can, to escape with knowledge and power to help your friends?" Jayhawk looked up sharply. "If you start thinking that way....Is that what Roth and Chalker thought? How they were caught?" "Not exactly." She sighed. "Roth and Chalker were good men, there are too few like them. I regret that bitterly, I regret the hasty decision that cost us their lives. I don't want to lose you too. You're incredibly gifted, Jayhawk; you took to the bike like someone who's been a rigger for years. It would be such a waste." A waste for what? What is going to happen to me? Aloud, she said quietly, "I guess there are some questions you don't ask around here." She stood up, offered Martha her right hand. Martha looked at her in puzzlement. "What--?" "As one of the lost to another...thanks." Martha smiled briefly, took her hand. "I don't know what an old fool like me has done to deserve this," she said hoarsely. "That's probably one of the questions it's better not to ask." "I suppose so.--Jayhawk, everyone here is crazy, one way or another. But if you can figure out how...you can cope." Jay laughed suddenly. "That's what Duende said. And Grant said, joking, 'Everybody but you, of course.' Duende just looked at him and said 'No, everybody.' You should have seen Grant's expression." There was a nervy hysterical edge to her laughter; hearing herself, she sobered suddenly. "He was good," said Martha. "A little rough, but good. I think you could be better, I really do. But at the moment it's all potential." "Don't tempt me," said Jayhawk sharply. "I'm confused enough as it is." She sat on her bike. "Shall we go back before we're missed?" "Do you think you can handle the bike?" "No problem." "Do you want me to set up an Overnet program, to protect you from...whatever it is?" Jayhawk shook her head. "I was aiding and abetting it, I don't think it can get at me while I'm awake." "While you're asleep, then? It's perfectly safe, I use one myself." "No." Martha sighed. "Jay, you really have to do something about these self-destructive impulses." "It's not self-destructive." She struggled to put her reasons into words. "We have to find out what this is; I can't survive without the Matrix, and you can't protect me there. And we won't find out if you block it, will we?" It occured to her that she was hoping Martha would disagree. "No, we won't." Martha nodded in apparent satisfaction. "Jayhawk, do you want me to remove the Matrix restrictions?" "No." At the other woman's questioning look; "I want to find out what's going on; but a speeding bike is probably not the best place." Martha chuckled. "All right. I think--I think I'm going to stay out here a while. You're welcome to hang around, do some exploring on your own--" Jayhawk shuddered, looking at the dense forest on either side, something she had been trying to ignore "--or head on back. You shouldn't stay out past sunset, it gets pretty wierd around here at night.--You're sure you can manage the bike? No control problems, no sluggishness?" "I'm fine," she said, a little more forcibly than she had intended, and jacked in before she had time to think about it. The transition was much smoother, no explosion of sensory input, just the strange distant awareness of flesh and machine. "See you later.--Take care of yourself, Martha." It was hard to believe that she was even this close to freedom, hard not to turn the bike and head off into the hills. The knowledge of the headware radio stopped her...that, and a certain unwillingness to subject Martha to whatever penalties the unseen masters of Montaigne Paradisio would devise. She kept her awareness carefully distant from the bike, gave the unseen presence nothing to work with, and reached the pyramid without incident. Slim was waiting for her at the hanger. She thought he might question Martha's absence, but he said only, "She's a good woman, Martha is." Jayhawk nodded, afraid to answer, and they walked back to her room in silence. At the door, prompted by some kind of morbid curiosity, she said, "Would you like to come in, have a soda?" "No thank you, ma'am. I'm a little shy with women, m'afraid." Somewhat relieved, she watched him go, then went into the bathroom and stripped off her pants. Scored into her leg were half a dozen long, shallow scratches, where she had driven the prongs of the program carrier through the cloth into her skin. She put some antiseptic on them, sat on the bathroom counter to think. Aliantha intended her to be a High Priestess. She remembered what Duende had said about them, the power and the madness he had described. She remembered Aliantha. 'Everyone here is crazy, one way or another.' Even Martha. High Priestess. What did that mean, beyond the undeniable power? Why would her enemies put such power in her hands? If they could make her loyal, what were they waiting for? And if not-- Everyone. She whispered aloud to the reflection in the mirror: "Even me?" -- Mary Kuhner 2/5/91 Article 31982 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!clyde.concordia.ca!nstn.ns.ca!news.cs.indiana.edu!att!linac!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!dali.cs.montana.edu!milton!evolution!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@evolution.u.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 17 Message-ID: <16134@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 9 Feb 91 08:53:27 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu Reply-To: mkkuhner@evolution.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 214 17. Darkness Resolved not to go to sleep, Jayhawk paced and drank coffee and put together useless bits of electronics. Hours dragged by. Now and then she glanced at her terminal, but left it alone. Her imagination suggested a sinister presence just outside the walls of her room, just behind the glassy screen, waiting for her. At exactly midnight she was startled up from the cable she was wrapping by the soft whisk of her door opening. "Hello?" she called. There was no response. Skin prickling, she walked to the door, looked out. The hallway had changed; it ended in a blank wall just to her left, curved off to her right, the first curves she had seen in the complex. She retreated into her room, hastily assembled a pocketful of useful tools from the electronics kit, then stepped out cautiously into the hall. After all, she told herself, she hadn't been forbidden going out alone, only told that if she *did* go out she would have an escort. Their fault if they'd slipped up. Some thirty meters along its gentle curve, the hallway ended in another door, which hissed open as she approached. The room beyond was pitch dark. She stopped on the threshold, waiting for her eyes to adjust. A voice, somewhere in the darkness: "Please come in." It was barely more than a whisper, the voice of something broken and in pain. Jayhawk stepped forward; behind her, the door sliced off the light. There was a pungent smell in the room, something that had not been apparent from outside; the smell of an animal imprisoned in a too-small space. "I've been wanting to meet you," the voice muttered, ahead of her and to her left. Machinery hummed all around her. "I noticed," said Jayhawk. "Was that you in my nightmares?" "You have nightmares? So do I....ahh. It hurts to talk, did you know that?" "I'm sorry." "They're all sorry. But it doesn't help much, does it? I have not been controlling your dreams, no. I can't even control my own." "My name is Jayhawk," she offered after a moment of silence. "I know," said the other, and chuckled laborously. "If not you...who is it? What is Aliantha doing with me?" "Aliantha is dead. You killed her." Jay drew in a sharp breath, surprise and a vicious satisfaction flooding through her. "I didn't think that was possible." "Normally it is not....It might be more accurate to say that she sacrificed herself to save you." "*Why?*" Her voice echoed off the surrounding machinery. "Why me? I don't understand." The other sighed. "Neither do I. I never understood Aliantha, and I have been trying for a long time. Think on it, child. Perhaps you can tell us." Jayhawk frowned. "Her operations were in ruins, she'd lost just about everything she had in Seattle. If she cared about that, then maybe....I don't know! I didn't know her." The voice in the darkness groaned softly, like someone rolling from one position to another when all positions are painful. Jayhawk froze in place as huge masses of machinery slid by her, unseen but felt, almost brushing her hair. For an instant she seemed to be enclosed by massive walls. Thinking of sharp edges and live wires, she did not reach out to confirm the impression. "Have you ever loved anyone?" "I don't know," said Jayhawk shortly. "Honest...that is good. Not even your parents? Or is that a painful thing, should I not ask?" "No, no. Mom and I...we weren't particularly close, but I guess we loved each other, *that* kind of love. But she...she didn't take to the Matrix. I haven't seen her in a while." "You are hard to understand. All of you." "If you want lessons in being human," said Jayhawk, "you're asking the wrong person." "I am not interested in becoming a human." Again the soft groan, and the sense of massive objects shifting all around her, leaving only a tiny spot untouched. "You were one once, weren't you?" "You are quick." Jayhawk reached out a hand cautiously, found that the space in front of her was empty again. "Do you want to see me, is that it?" said the voice. "Curiosity?" "No, if you want your privacy who am I to take it away?" She felt just a little sorry for the--what *was* she speaking to? The voice was not discernably male or female. "Interesting code, what you were writing." "*I* don't get any privacy," she said bitterly, her sympathy evaporating. "Child, child, you told it to me." "I know that now. I didn't then." "Everything you do, everything you say...shouts at me." "Not my fault!" "No. No one's fault." "Someone set this up, someone created Paradisio, *someone* is responsible." "So long ago. And that person has paid the price, far and above. Or perhaps not. It becomes hard to remember." The other sighed again. "If you would like to see a working example of that code--" A directory path. "Martha wrote it, years ago. Can you guess for who?" "Aliantha." "Yes. But she never tried it. I wonder why? Perhaps you will tell me someday." Jayhawk shivered, said unhappily, "May I sit down?" "There is a chair behind you." She felt backward, found it, sat down heavily. "*I've* tried it. It was an interesting experience. But damn it, you people seem to have done everything first." She had killed Aliantha, the trick had been good enough for that. It was almost a comfort, almost. "It was a very profitable line of research...for some. I would not recommend that you try it here. Or perhaps...perhaps I would." A long pause. The animal smell was thick in the air. "Do you believe in fate?" Before Jayhawk could answer, the other went on, "I don't, I think, although they tell me....Perhaps I am getting senile. That might be it. I like to think that all of this will be over soon, one way or the other. "You are probably tired. I should let you rest." Jayhawk stood, holding the back of the chair with one hand. "If you want to talk again--well, I'm not going anywhere, and I doubt you are either. Feel free." "Let me give you something before you go." A sharp tingle, almost painful, ran through her, as if she had touched a live wire. "You are free to access the Matrix now, within this complex; we cannot let you go further yet. Take care." "Thank you," said Jayhawk in a very small voice, caught between desire and fear. "You're welcome." Behind her a door slid open, flooding the room with glare; very vaguely she could make out the glitter of glass ahead of her, the duller reflections of metal. She groped her way out, walked back down the corridor to her room. She found Martha's code in a file which had previously been scrambled, but was now plaintext. It was fairly similar to her own. Code to merge headware OS with the mainframe's, set her thoughts free within the machine itself. Written for Aliantha. It had the earmarks of something created on and for the Matrix, difficult to understand outside its native habitat. She puzzled over an odd construction for a while, then almost without thinking about it set her hand to the I/O port, jacked in. The transition was perfectly smooth, without disorientation or shock; to her surprise, the node she accessed was an almost perfect copy of her room. Martha's program was lying on the 'desk', a slender silver needle. It was a beautiful piece of code, written, examination suggested, as much to be beautiful as to be optimal. Her own Matrix image was just as she remembered, black-haired and sheathed in silver. She frowned, wondering at that. The code which maintained that image was lost with her deck. Where was it coming from? Abruptly she jacked out, sat back, arms folded across her chest. Free on the Matrix, whatever barriers had kept her from it gone. Did the presences that lurked in her dreams have free access now too? She had sensed nothing while she was jacked in. Not yet. Her nerves prickled, teased more than satisfied by the brief delight of the Matrix. Deliberately she shut the terminal down, lay down on the bed. As she was drifting off, a thought occured to her, an imagined scene: A young woman about her own age, sitting at a terminal much like her own, talking to an unseen presence. 'Is there no way I can escape, not even to die?' 'Not even to die, Aliantha. Unless--unless you bring us someone to be your successor. Then you can go free.' 'She sacrificed herself for you,' the voice in the darkness had told Jayhawk. But it seemed to her now that it was the other way around; that her life, her soul was the price for Aliantha's long-awaited death. -- Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu Article 31983 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!clyde.concordia.ca!nstn.ns.ca!news.cs.indiana.edu!att!linac!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!dali.cs.montana.edu!milton!evolution!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@evolution.u.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 18 Message-ID: <16135@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 9 Feb 91 08:54:54 GMT References: <405@rc6.urc.tue.nl> <1991Feb9.081631.16305@cs.dal.ca> Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu Reply-To: mkkuhner@evolution.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 115 18. Matrix Jayhawk barely slept, afraid that something would intrude on her dreams. The door's buzz was a relief from her tossing. "Hello!" said Martha. "Having trouble sleeping? I thought you might be. Doc sent some pills, if you like." "*No*. Not a good idea." "All right. How did, ah, your meeting go? What did he say?" "He? That's a he?" The speaker in the darkness had reminded her, if anything, of her grandmother, dying slowly in a rest home. "I think so, though I'm not quite sure. It may not be relevant." "He said that Aliantha was dead." She had trouble keeping a certain satisfaction out of her voice. Martha stiffened, then let out a long slow breath. "I know. The news came in last night." Jayhawk bit her lip. "Martha, were you and Aliantha friends?" "I try to be friends with everyone. We were quite close for a while, though we drifted apart. Friends, yes." "I...I can't say I regret it. But I sympathize." Martha looked up. "Oh, don't worry about me, Jay. I'll cope, I always do." And in a softer voice, "But thank you for the concern. Did he say anything else?" "Not really. More introspection than conversation, if you know what I mean. He seemed unhappy." "Yes....How are you feeling? Are you up to a tour of the Matrix?" "Sure." She crawled out of bed, settled herself in her chair. Martha merely reached out, set her hand to a suddenly-appearing port in the wall. Smooth as silk, the transition, easy as opening her eyes. She found Martha already in the simulated bedroom, looking at her intently. "All right?" the older woman said. "No problems? Let's go." For over an hour they wandered through the system. As far as Jayhawk could tell, it was a ridiculously accurate copy of the physical layout. She could sort out nodes from internodes, sense the underlying archetecture, but it would have been easy to pretend that she was still in physical space. They never approached the outside, never saw a SAN node. Martha gestured briefly at a glass-walled hall. "Security." Inside, banks of monitors flickered with activity, ringing a huge, rotating model of the Northern Hemisphere. Lights glittered across its surface. Everywhere they went, Jayhawk had the impression of many people, furious activity, just out of sight. But she saw no one. "Data Control Central." Remembering the perfectly bare room Slim had shown her, Jayhawk was intrigued to see a room packed full of computer equipment, rather archaic but still impressive in its size. Only on the Matrix? Or had it existed in the real world, and had they somehow blinded her to it? At last they made their way back to her room, Jayhawk filling in details of her map as they went. "So," said Martha. "Tell me what you think, honestly." "Honestly? A remarkably inefficient use of an unbelievably powerful computer." It had been all one system, as far as she could tell, a system far huger than anything she had ever run. Martha sighed. "I think that once you get used to it, it adds a certain...hominess? I rather like it." "It's very impressive." Jayhawk turned away, the midnight hair of her Matrix image cascading over her shoulder. "If this was a test--and I imagine it was--did I pass?" "Can't you stop--" Martha began in annoyance. "No, I suppose you can't. It's not a test, Jayhawk. I just thought you might be having trouble sleeping, and might like some company, that's all." "I'm sorry," said Jayhawk, a little abashed. "I did enjoy it." Casting about for a safer subject: "How does the interface work? How is the Matrix image maintained without a deck?" They spent the next several hours in an intense technical discussion. At first Martha seemed to be feeling her way, trying to find how much Jayhawk knew, but when her first attempts were met with ready comprehension she unleashed a flood of information. She seemed to have all the technical journals at her fingertips, papers that Jayhawk had intended to read but never gotten around to, others that she had never heard of. She called a halt only when Jayhawk was dizzy with exhaustion. "You'd better at least try to sleep, this is not good for you at all." Jayhawk bit her lip, tried to reason it out through the haze in her mind. If she stayed awake, eventually she would have to deal with the enemy befuddled, sick and weak. And she couldn't stay awake forever. "Good night, then, and thanks again for the tour." Martha nodded, and walked out of the room--still on the Matrix, Jayhawk realized in startlement, leaving her body, presumably, jacked in near the door. But when she jacked out, looked around the room, Martha was gone. -- Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu Article 32056 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!van-bc!ubc-cs!uw-beaver!milton!evolution!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@evolution.u.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 19 Message-ID: <16174@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 10 Feb 91 22:13:30 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu Reply-To: mkkuhner@evolution.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 182 19. Dreams Something was inside her, editing her headware code, the MCPC chips that let her run the Matrix...probing into her thoughts, the vaguely-sensed system that supported them. She could not understand what it was doing; she didn't know her own mind well enough. She could only watch, helpless. Another joined it, a second presence...sometimes amplifying the changes of the first, sometimes altering them, sometimes...restoring? She couldn't tell. Jayhawk woke abruptly, lay staring up at the ceiling. Her thoughts were crystal-clear, sharper than they had been for days. Almost too clear. It was hard to push the terror away. She recognized the second presence; it seemed to her that she had always known who it was, managed somehow not to grasp the obvious until now. It was Aliantha. The first was familiar also, but she could put no name to it. She lay and thought of ghosts, of Chalker and his gang haunting the ashes of their hideout. She recalled the run she had made against a computer which no longer existed, the cold shadows that had reached out at her from places which the Matrix should never have touched. She remembered Aliantha. For a few hours she had dared to hope that her death meant....It meant nothing. They had learned that, fighting the Paradisians, living with Duende. No escape. She herself had died, if Martha was to be believed. And here she was. Jayhawk got up, logged into her terminal, checked the time. Only an hour had passed since Martha left her. She rubbed her eyes, checked again, wondering if she had slept for twenty-five hours; but the date was the same. She was not tired. She felt perfectly rested, almost unnaturally clear-headed, utterly healthy. Cleansed, as if by a full night's sleep and a vigorous shower. Tingling with energy. Letting out a long, slow breath, she jacked in, examined the safeguards she had put on her headware code. From the Matrix they looked primitive, almost childish; she could see half a dozen ways around them. She added another layer of defenses, Matrix code which she could never have matched from outside. None of her alarms had been triggered. She was not terribly surprised. She spent a moment considering how she might allow the code to signal her--could it sound an alarm? Her terminal didn't have the capacity, though she might be able....She shook her head, startled. What had she been thinking? Code to access the outside world directly, to change, not this Matrix representation of her room, but the reality? Impossible. For a moment, until she attended to her own thoughts, she had been planning to do it. And she had known how. She finished setting the safeguards, went looking for Martha. The previous day's tour had included her office, a cluttered room somewhere near the center. Jayhawk found her there, bending over a bit of code manifest as a broken bell. She looked up when Jayhawk knocked, smiled. "Come in. I was just about to have a coffee break anyway." Her smile faded as Jayhawk cleared a place on one of the tables, sat down. "Are you all right? It's not been very long. Couldn't sleep?" In a quiet toneless voice, Jayhawk said, "I slept for an hour. I'm wide awake, not tired at all. Completely rested. My dreams were horrendous." "I'm sorry," said Martha, putting the bell down, then seemed to register what Jay had said. "Completely rested? Physically? Did you check, is your body--?" "I didn't move around much, but I felt fine. Usually when I'm tired my head aches, my eyes ache. None of that." "I think we should have a look at you," said Martha briskly. "If you don't mind?" "I would like to understand." Even to herself, she seemed unnaturally calm, dangerously so. So clear. A little panic would have been a kindness. They returned across the Matrix to Jayhawk's room, and Martha asked her to sit in the console chair, 'where' her physical body would be in the real world. The older woman then proceeded to pull out a succession of tools from her pockets, some so ludicrous that Jayhawk suspected she was deliberately manipulating the Matrix representation. Trying to set her at ease, perhaps. She sat quietly while Martha peered and prodded at her. "Wonderful," she said at last with a smile. "Absolutely wonderful. I wouldn't have believed it. Your cyberware is--your whole body is fine-tuned, as it were. Perfectly balanced. You're making a superb adjustment, much better than we could have expected." She looked at Jayhawk's expression, winced. "In any case, it would seem to be a temporary condition, though perhaps later when you have better control--" "It wasn't me," said Jayhawk grimly. "What? Ah, the dreams. There's been no sign of intrusion, though I can check again if you like. I think they're just nightmares, Jayhawk-- after all, you're trying to adapt to a radically new situation." She met Jayhawk's eyes for a moment, looked away. "I've never seen such a perfect match. She was right after all." "*Match with what?*" Her skin crawled. Her mind, her body, with Aliantha's? "Body and cyberware. I had some doubts, but apparently she knew what she was doing, as usual. You're very luck--Well. I don't think anything is wrong with you. Quite the contrary." A third person entered the room with them, a stocky gnome with long pointed ears; he handed Martha a slip of paper, bowed and vanished. Martha unrolled and read it. "No, no intrusions in some time.--I could have a ward circle set up for you to sleep in. Some people find them helpful, though others--like me--can't tell one way or another." Jayhawk hesistated, wondering what the powers that moved in her dreams would do if their access were blocked. "No, thanks." She had not known what she would answer until she heard herself say it. "If you're right it won't help, and if I'm right...it won't help." Martha frowned. "I could monitor you more closely, if you didn't mind wearing--" The device she produced resembled a tall, conical hat with a red light at its top. She chuckled at Jayhhawk's expression. "I have one with a propellor at the top, too, but I didn't think....No, I thought not." She set it on Jayhawk's head, where it tingled a moment, faded to unnoticability. "Make sure you're wearing that whenever you're on the Matrix." "I don't think that the Matrix--" "No, well, it has extensions to the Overnet, and to a few...other places. Worth a try." "Martha. What will happen next, what is to be done with me?" And when the other woman hesitated, "Short-term, at the very least. It would really help to know." "I imagine you'll finish recovering, and we'll make sure everything's working correctly, body and cyberware." Martha glanced at Jayhawk as if wondering whether to say more, decided against it. "I should get back to work. Always something going wrong around here. It's enough to wear an old woman out. Not that I can't cope, mind you. It just feels like emptying the sea with an eyedropper sometimes." "Can I help?" "Bless your heart. Of course you can." She turned toward the door, then stopped. "Let me show you a shortcut. This walking around is all very well, but sometimes one's in a hurry." She raised a hand in a gesture startling only in its setting, the graceful shaping gestures of magic. Jayhawk tensed, watching in intent curiosity. A silver line formed in the air in front of Martha, then rotated, gaining width as it did, to become a shimmering rectangle of silver. Martha stepped through it, vanished. Jayhawk lingered a moment, wishing for code with which to analyze the construct, then followed her. She found herself in Martha's workroom. The silver door rotated back to a line and vanished. "Just CPU teleport, really," said Martha confidingly. "Generalized, as it were." She cleared Jayhawk some working space, handed her a tangle of wiring. "Here. See what you can do with this." Jayhawk sat down, began to tease out the purpose of the code she was examining. It was a trivial alarm of some kind, familiar in general though constructed to unfamiliar standards. "Jayhawk," said Martha after a few minutes, "are you interested in learning the Overnet?" "Passionately," she said without thinking, engrossed in her problem. Martha sighed softly. "All right. I'll see what I can do." -- Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu Article 32449 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!zephyr.ens.tek.com!uw-beaver!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 20 Message-ID: <16607@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 17 Feb 91 19:28:59 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu Reply-To: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 171 20. Ghosts Jayhawk sat in confinement and brooded on ghosts...Aliantha's, and eventually the first she had met, the ghosts of Chalker and his gang, murdered by Parasdisio. Terminated, rather, when it seemed that the attack Jayhawk's group was making would succeed. The blood was on her hands too. --As was Aliantha's, by all accounts. A shiver of bitter pride, through the fear. Memories barely more than a month old. It seemed like years. ** Jayhawk sat sulking in Grant's bedroom, pretending to work. It was no use; curiosity was gnawing her out from the inside. A node associated with a non-existant computer! What kind of freak of Matrix space could that represent, what might its implications be? Yoichi was watching her carefully, making quite sure that she didn't try investigating it on her own. She bristled with fury. How dare he, what business was it of his? *She'd* rescued *him*, and now he was behaving as if he were her nursemaid. An idea occurred to her. "I'm going to work from the Matrix side," she said sweetly. "I'll turn on the video monitor, okay?" Yoichi nodded approval. Video monitored. Anything she did on the Matrix would be displayed in glorious full color for everyone in the place to see. At least that was what they thought. She put together a packet of code quickly, pulling in recorded images from earier runs. Innocuous images, everyday Matrix operations. From this side, the video monitor appeared as a security camera fixed on her. She hung her handiwork over its lens, grinned at it. Within the box she'd crafted, a miniature Jayhawk went on with her innocent business. Free, she flashed across the Matrix, into the loose openwork tangle of the Redmond Barrens. The ghost node was still there, a flickering reverse-video image of the castle gates that had once graced Wired Lightning's system. Destroyed a week ago, she had picked through the pieces herself. Was the image being sustained by some resonance among the surrounding nodes? Her analysis programs insisted that nothing was there at all. What kind of data would flow through such a node naturally? She pondered for a moment, set up a loose generic disguise. She'd pose as network packets, electronic mail--*everyone* got electronic mail. Even ghosts. Slipped through the portcullis, and was inside. She had run Wired Lightning before, twice. This was nothing familiar. Grey mist, no sign of the node boundaries, no sense of the dataflow. Somewhere behind her, an actinic spotlight cut into the mist; she could see her own shadow, like a dwindling black tunnel. She turned and looked for the source of the light, succeeded only in blinding herself. Her analysis programs offered nothing, not even the deceptively normal readings of outside. She might as well not have been on the Matrix. The light would at least serve as a landmark. She walked forward along her shadow tunnel, the mist thick around her. Like a Smoke program, maybe, confusing her readings. Abruptly it cleared. She stood in a small, cluttered, unfamiliar room, no part of the system that she'd seen before. Wall hangings of wood and leather, one whole wall apparently just a curtain of deerhide. The other furnishings were equally primitive, a bed stuffed with some kind of plant, bare earth for the floor. She peered more closely at the walls. Not a room at all, a *cave*. How peculiar. A shaft of sunlight made its way through the curtain. She pushed it aside, looked out. The sunlight illuminated a small clearing surrounded by mist and the suggestion of trees. At the clearing's center something peculiar was hanging in the air--like a window, but unsupported, unattached to its surroundings. She could see forest and mountains through it, tall mountains snowless to their summits. A middle-aged man dressed in ragged furs was sitting in front of the window, legs folded, chanting softly. He broke off the chant abruptly, turned to stare at her. It was Chalker. She had helped carry his body to the pyre. The first dead man she had ever touched; she could still remember the waxy coldness of his skin. "Hello?" she said, rather inanely. He rose, stood with his back to the window, one hand raised. There were faces in the mist around the clearing, she saw now. Pale, pale faces with empty eyes. He spoke, apparently to her; the words were meaningless, a peculiar mumble. "I don't understand." He frowned, spoke again. Encrypted, she thought suddenly, and by a protocol she wasn't set to handle. The thought was a flicker of reassuring normality. He spoke a third time, more sharply, and took a step forward. She shrank back, felt something cold brush against her. Unseen, the mist had curled in, creeping between her and the curtain. The faces in it were speaking too. She didn't understand them, didn't want to. Cold fingers of mist plucked at her. Cold waxy fingers. *I can't talk to him anyway. What's the point?* she told herself, turned and fled through the curtain. There was no room beyond; only mist, clinging and opaque. She thought she could see a glimmer where the searchlight had been, but she wasn't altogether sure. Fighting panic, she groped her way toward it, struggling with her software. It still told her nothing, denied that this place even existed. There was the light, and the shadowy gates. She flung herself out, heedless of alarms--who would respond to an alarm here? The telecom node outside was reassuringly clean and normal and solid. She fled back toward Grant's system and her body. Jacked out, and looked around in relief. Across the room, Ratty's head pricked up, crimson eyes fixed on her. "Quick!" he hissed. "Jay, don't move. Everyone else, get out of the circle." Weeks ago Channa had painted a warding circle on the bedroom floor; Jayhawk's chair and terminal were in it. She clutched the back of the chair, wondering what was happening, as the others crowded into the marginal amount of unwarded space. Ratty uncurled from the floor, raised his hands. "Let me see you, trespasser," he whispered. A coldness like mist brushed against Jayhawk, coalesced. The shadow of a woman, mist-pale and translucent, stood at the circle's center. "What are you doing here?" Ratty demanded, his own face almost as pale. "Cold," the apparition. "So cold....waiting so long...." "Go back," said the shaman in a voice of authority. "You have no right to be here, to take this one. Don't you trust my word? I have promised you your vengeance, and you shall have it. But you must wait for the time of my choosing." The woman bowed deeply, shivered into nothingness. There was an instant of stunned silence; then half a dozen voices babbled at once, questioning Ratty. Through the hubbub Jayhawk saw Yoichi looking at her with an expression at once hurt and faintly admiring. "All right," he said. "How did you do it?" Jayhawk grinned sheepishly and explained. Yoichi shook his head. "I should have known. All right. But next time, will you *please* tell me? Someone has to keep an eye on you." ** She would never see Yoichi again. Or perhaps she would, and he would look at her with the same wary disdain he gave Duende. An agent of the Paradisians. Worse, if Martha was to be believed. A High Priest. Even Duende had not been that. 'Isn't your duty to live, to escape back to your friends with power and information they can use?' She wished she believed it. -- Mary Kuhner 2/17/91 mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu Article 32450 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!zephyr.ens.tek.com!uw-beaver!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 21 Message-ID: <16608@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 17 Feb 91 19:29:51 GMT References: <16607@milton.u.washington.edu> Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu Reply-To: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 173 21. Charlotte Jayhawk paced in her room like a caged animal, unable to concentrate on anything for more than an hour at a time. She had nearly finished rewriting the interface code, but she no longer had any hope that it would help her escape. The Paradisians had thought of it first, as they seemed to think of everything first. She searched the Matrix for Martha, but couldn't find her. She managed to spend several hours mapping the system before that, too, staled. At last she said to the listening air, "Send an escort, please, I'd like to go out." When she walked to the door Slim was already there, tipping his hat to her. She tried not to look at what was underneath it. "Morning, ma'am. Where'd you like to go?" "Where would you recommend?" He thought about it for a moment, forehead splitting into moist furrows. "I could take you to the preservation range," he offered. She nodded, let him lead. According to her headware map--which seemed to need continual updating, new passages appearing or disappearing daily, though the basic layout was constant--they walked nearly across the pyramid, skirting, as always, the very center. Slim palmed a door open, gestured her inside. Or outside--it looked like night, starry night with trees all around. The air was full of birdsong and the rich heavy smell of tropical vegetation. "Are you afraid of cats?" "No..." said Jayhawk dubiously. Animals of any sort made her somewhat uncomfortable, but she was disinclined to explain even such a trivial weakness to a Paradisian. "Good. I'll show you Charlotte." He set off down a vaguely-discernable path. Jayhawk followed, wincing as the trees closed in. Slim stopped in the middle of a clearing, pulled at a metal ring set incongruously in the grass. It lifted to reveal a small compartment, from which he carefully removed several wrapped packages. They proved to contain--Jayhawk turned away hastily, somewhere between horrified giggles and nausea. *Someone who looks that much like raw meat himself should--should be careful around predators, that's for sure.* She bit her lip savagely. If she laughed out loud, Slim would ask why.... Slim sat down, apparently prepared to wait; after a moment she followed suit. The bird sounds, dampened by their presence, flared up again, then died away suddenly to nothing. Silent as thought, a huge shape paced out from the darkness of the trees. It did look like a cat, tawny-gold and richly furred, with dark tufts on the tips of its ears and tail. But it was larger than she had imagined such creatures could become. "Hello, Charlotte," said Slim softly; the cat walked up to him, accepted a bit of raw meat with a dainty nip. He scratched behind her ears. A mountain lion? Jayhawk wondered. A regular lion? The cat had no mane, only a slightly thicker ruffle in her fur. She vaguely remembered that only male lions had manes. But surely they didn't get this big? Her head would have reached nearly to Jayhawk's shoulder, standing up; at it was, Jay was looking *up* into wide golden eyes. Gengineered, probably. Another crazy Paradisian project. "What is she?" Gingerly, she reached out, brushed her fingers across Charlotte's fur. It was softer than she had expected, and very thick. "Like this," said Slim, scratching more forcefully. Charlotte lay down at his side, began to emit a rumbling purr. "She's a hunting cat," he went on. "High Priest Merrow's project, before he died. I've been taking care of the projects, more or less. Seemed as though someone should." He offered Charlotte the rest of the meat, which disappeared in two gulps. "Isn't she beautiful? So much fur....I always liked fur." Charlotte rolled over, her paws kneading gently at the air. Jayhawk scratched her stomach, nodded. The cat *was* beautiful, in an somewhat frightening fashion. She was reminded of the Spider. "There's all sorts of animals here. I think Charlotte's parents are still out there, somewhere." Slim's voice was almost dreamy. The space on her map was grossly inadequate to the apparent size of this midnight forest. "What do they look like?" "Like her, I think, but smaller. She's still growing, that's what they tell me. Will be, all her life. She's slowed down a little, though. She grew powerful fast when she was a cub." "Wow," said Jayhawk cautiously. She didn't want to interrupt Slim in a confiding mood. The High Priest had died? So it could happen? "Sometimes I come out here and we lie down, Charlotte and I, and look at the stars. I always wanted to go to the stars when I was growing up. Crazy dream. You ever look at the stars, Jayhawk?" "Not often, not in Seattle....Where did you grow up?" Tonelessly: "I don't think about that much anymore." Stupid, Jayhawk, she berated herself. If you can't say the right thing, at least keep your big mouth shut. For a long moment they sat in silence broken only by the subterranean rumble of Charlotte's purr. "Merrow said I'd have fur like this someday," Slim said at last, to Charlotte or the air, she thought, rather than to her. "But I guess he was always too busy, and then he died. Gone to heaven. You believe in heaven, Jayhawk?" She thought about it for a moment. "No. I've *seen* where dead people go." "You have?" She caught herself, remembering that the Paradisians might not know about Chalker. "Some people, anyway. Maybe if you lived a good life...." She laughed softly, inviting him to share the bitter joke. He only nodded gravely. Silence again. Charlotte seemed to have fallen asleep, her head on Slim's knee. The birds, emboldened, resumed their noisemaking. "I like animals. I guess I sort of took charge here, though there's them as would dispute it." "If you're taking care of them," she ventured, "you seem to have as much right as anyone." "Any animals around where you come from?" "Squirrels, at the University. They're real tame and cheeky, everyone feeds them." She'd been bitten by one once, when she disputed ownership of her sandwich. "We have squirrels around here, too. Charlotte doesn't like them much." "Or vice versa, I imagine." He chuckled. "Most of the animals, they're what you'd call real used to people being around. Not too wild anymore. Charlotte and me, we're pretty good friends." Unwise though it seemed, she could not resist the opportunity to ask questions. "Slim, do you know--do you know why they're keeping me like this?" Like a precious animal in an invisible cage.... "No, ma'am." He rose, gently shifting Charlotte's head to the grass; she hardly stirred. "Best we be getting back." His voice was more sad than secretive. The door back into the corridor-maze looked, from this side, like a panel set into the trunk of a banyan tree. Slim hesistated just before touching it, said softly, "Jayhawk, you've been to see His Nibs, haven't you?" The speaker in darkness? she guessed, nodded. "If you see him again, would you ask him about the fur?" Caught by a sudden wash of pity and fury, she knotted her hands until the metal of the program carrier bit into her fingers. "I will. I promise." They walked back in silence to Jayhawk's room. "One thing, ma'am," he said at the door. "You don't have to call for me." "They told me I needed an escort to go out." He touched the brim of his hat in a kind of salute. "I'll be there." He was gone before she could think of a reply. -- Mary Kuhner 2/15/91 Article 32742 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!ogicse!cs.uoregon.edu!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 22 Message-ID: <16910@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 21 Feb 91 23:03:42 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu Reply-To: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 134 22. Storm Jayhawk dreamed that she was travelling, flowing from one abstract place to another, or perhaps stretched between them. Travelling to a destination that was somehow subtly wrong, held back by a vaguely- sensed attachment. It broke at last with a terrible internal snap, catapulting her forward into--sunlight? Into awareness. Wide awake. Three hours had passed on the terminal's time display. She wondered whether her captors were playing games with her. Without external cues, she had only the clock and her own biorhythms to go on, and they clearly disagreed. But somehow she didn't think so. It had *felt* like three hours' sleep. But...sufficient. She went back to her programming. Several hours and an untasted lunch later, she was interrupted by Martha's appearance. "Ready for a jog?" She looked Jayhawk over carefully. "You look like you're feeling better." Jayhawk snorted, followed her out. As they wove the maze of corridors, Martha said seriously, "Do you still want to learn the Overnet?" Jay nodded. "We'll have to get Doc to give you a full checkup, then. This afternoon, would that be all right? He'll have to be, ah, thorough, I'm afraid. I can stay with you if you like, or ask someone else....Of course, if you'd rather I didn't, I would understand completely." "I don't think it matters," said Jayhawk. She'd been in and out of cyberclinics since she was eighteen; medical examinations no longer bothered her. Martha looked at her sharply, seemed to decide that she was sincere. "It'll depend on what Doc says, of course, but if everything checks out we can begin quite soon." "Begin what?" "Introducing you to the Overnet....I, ah, it would be better to save this for later. Procedures, you know." Jayhawk stopped cold, collected herself with an effort, went on. At Martha's inquiring look, she said in a low voice, "When you tell me that you can't explain something now, but it will be all right later, I worry. I think you should be able to understand why." Martha snorted. "I am *not* going to mess with you. Don't worry about that.--It's just hard to explain in advance, that's all. Impossible, really. Jayhawk, did you enjoy the Matrix, the first time?" Jayhawk stared at her. "Of course I did. It was like...like doing one-finger typing all your life, and then getting a full-response keyboard. Or--or like--" Martha laughed. "You don't have to tell me, I know." "Why?" "The Overnet...it reacts differently to different people, and they to it. Have you ever been the target of a spell?" At Jayhawk's nod: "What did it feel like?" "Depends on the spell." Martha looked at her in apparent surprise as she went on: "Sometimes you don't feel it at all, sometimes it's really obvious.--Martha, is this instructions, or on your own initiative?" "Some of both, really." The older woman pursed her lips, thinking. "Have you ever been invisible? What did that feel like?" "I didn't feel anything in particular. It was disturbing, not seeing myself, but no worse than playing games with my Matrix image, and I've done that. You get used to it." Martha stopped abruptly, nearly tripping Jayhawk. "Damn! I've got business elsewhere, urgently. Can you find your way back?" "Sure." She was still mapping every twist and turn in headware. "See you later." Without a word or gesture, Martha vanished, suddenly and completely. Jayhawk reached out, felt empty air. She stood in the hallway with her mouth open, amazed. Alone.--It's a test, she realized suddenly. To see which way I'll jump. She turned slowly, considering the labyrinth of the pyramid around her. Well. I should probably go back. But there's no one to say I have to hurry about it. "Especially since I'm out of breath," she said out loud, and panted a little for the benefit of the unseen listener. She mapped out a route back to her room, not quite the shortest, and began a leisurely walk in that direction. Some ten minutes later--the corridors were all identical, nothing but her map to suggest progress-- there was a chime in the air about her. An inhuman, sourceless voice said softly, "Warning. Storm at 28777 dot 50." Experimentally, Jayhawk responded, "Tell me where there's a room I can shelter in. I don't know the complex yet." There was no answer. The nearest room on her map was one of the gardens Slim had shown her. She made a sharp turn, headed in that direction--jogging, now. "Warning. Storm at 28777 dot 5." Something was moving in the passageway ahead of her. A shimmer in the air, like heat mirages over a summer road; translucent, but somehow obscuring what lay behind it. Jayhawk froze, one hand on the cool metal of the wall. It crept toward her silently. *What would happen? Would I die, could even the Paradisians bring me back from that?* She stared into the rippling air, caught on the edge of decision, then tore her eyes away and ran. Once more her own endurance surprised her; she reached her room only mildly out of breath, having lost the storm almost at once. She paused in the open doorway, looked for it. The corridors were empty and still. In all the times she had walked those halls, she had never seen a living thing besides Martha and Slim. She rested her head against the doorframe, wondering at herself. If it had been a test....What would they conclude? That she didn't have the will to kill herself, or the initiative to grab at a chance to escape. Duende had escaped Paradisio; reprogrammed the biomonitors and defused the bomb they'd left in his skull, shattered a Gate behind him and walked away free. She was not Duende. If there was any hope for her, it lay elsewhere. On the Matrix-- She went back to her programming once more. -- Mary Kuhner 2/20/91 mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu Article 32743 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!ogicse!cs.uoregon.edu!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Jayhawk 23 Message-ID: <16912@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 21 Feb 91 23:04:45 GMT References: <16910@milton.u.washington.edu> Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu Reply-To: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 146 23. Package The medical exam came and went; Jayhawk was sardonically amused to note that Doc seemed quite curious whether she was fertile. If they thought that B-movie horrors would impress her.... Some hours later, the door swished open. She snatched up her toolkit, looked out. There was nothing to be seen but a large cardboard box. She brought it in, set to unwrapping it, snorting at her immediate suspicion that it might be a bomb. She should be so lucky. There was a silver card just inside the outer wrappings. It said, "Enjoy the present. J." Under that, carefully packaged in foam, was her deck. She turned it over several times, then took it to the workbench and methodically disassembled it. It *was* her deck, down to the little bell Yoichi had installed to signal that she was on the Matrix. The wire leading to it still hung loose; she had clipped it herself. She buried her head in her arms. How had the Paradisians come by it? Her friends.... Who was J? She ran through names, beginning at the top. Aliantha, or Megan as Martha had called her. Martha. Slim. Shamrock. Lefty. The Steel Mage, the Investigator, Rhesa.... Jorge Mixcapotec had sacrificed Yoichi. A priest, though not a High Priest, she thought. But Jorge was dead, burned to ashes in the last fight at Cavilard base. As if that mattered. Eventually she put the deck back together, rigged up a connector cable that would match her datajack. Holding her breath, she made the connection--headware to deck, first, while she ran through the checklist, then deck to mainframe. She found herself in the Matrix image of her room. Nothing had changed, except for the menu of software nestled comfortably somewhere in the back of her mind. Her own programs, as a careful inspection verified. *Something* should have been different. She'd been running naked on the Matrix, nothing but headware between her and the machine. Having a deck *had* to make a difference, didn't it? All that stimsense software, all that preprocessing? She ran tests, jacked out and ran them again without the deck. Nothing. Identical to the limits of her measurements. Because both were stimsense illusions? she wondered. It was an unappealing idea. The near-perfect Matrix copy of her room was beginning to bother her. In a distracted mood, she might mistake one for the other....Not a good situation, instinct warned her. She dug through the deck software, found a semi-abstract pattern of gold and orange and plastered it across the Matrix walls. There. That was better. The Matrix-image door whisked open. Still jacked in, she looked out into the next node. There was nothing, not even a package. Puzzled, she disconnected. The real-world door was also standing open, a bundle of fabric blocking it. Jayhawk got up, nudged the bundle with one foot until it unfolded. Wall hangings. Gold and orange wall hangings. She swore aloud, backed away as if the fabric might bite her. The consternation turned to giggles, almost hysterical ones. So much for getting a grip on reality, eh? Well, she was *not* going to put the stupid things up. Let them do their own redecorating. She logged back in for the illusion of privacy. No doubt the Matrix room was as well-bugged as the real, but somehow it felt more solitary. Methodically she checked through the software, found a program she had been working on before her capture. She was still engrossed in it when Martha arrived. "Hi! Glad to see you're okay--?" A questioning look. "Just came by to see what all the activity was. Mm, I like the walls." "Just unpacking," said Jayhawk. "Someone sent me a present." She gestured at the software, represented here by a wild collection of blue-and-silver gear. "Oh? I thought you'd written it yourself." "All of this? In an *hour*? I'm good, but not that good." "Oh, I think you might surprise yourself. I have a great deal of faith in you." "I don't know whether to be flattered on my own account or offended on my code's." "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to step on any toes.--A present? From whom?" "I don't know. The package said 'J'. Martha, this is *my* deck, as far as I can tell. Does that mean my friends...?" "Not as far as I've heard," said Martha briskly, "and I expect I would have heard. That's very strange, I can't think who could have sent it. I can check, if you like. And on your friends, though there's no one in Seattle anymore, so I can't imagine....Is there anything else you'd like, while I'm at it?" "News would be nice.--What did Doc say?" She tried to keep the eagerness out of her voice, failed. Too much versimilitude in the Matrix image, a mixed blessing. "He's still working on his report. I'll see if I can manage a newsfeed. No posting priviledges, I'm afraid." She smiled apologetically, excused herself. Jayhawk finished inventorying her software--not a bad assortment, if she did say so herself, including a working copy of the code she and Kurt had written, the OS/wetware interface. She stored it carefully, not in headware. She didn't want the nightmares pawing through it. A small gnome scurried into the room, offered her a card. She took it, read the text as the gnome stood by, arms folded behind its back. 'Nothing on either question, sorry. Enjoy the news. Martha.' She crumpled the card in her fist, deleting it, and nodded to the gnome; it ran off. She jacked out and lay on the bed, sudden exhaustion catching up with her. Exhaustion and something else. 'I thought you'd written it yourself.' Martha was a programmer, she knew how long it took to write good code. Maybe she *had* written it herself. J for Jayhawk. Like the wall hangings. The pattern was there in her mind; she and Grant had designed her deck from scratch, all the code was hers, or hers and Kurt's, or hers and Yoichi's. She'd been working on trying to reconstruct some of that code, and the machine, responsive to her desires...had provided it. Don't be silly, Jayhawk, she told herself. Why don't you go to sleep? It will probably look better in the morning. "No!" she said aloud, sat bolt upright, heart racing. *Would* it look better in the morning, was that the trap? Until the High Priestess' power was as natural to her as breathing, and as essential? No. No. She was fabricating terrors out of nothing, as the person who had sent the package no doubt intended. She mustn't let them get to her like this. Tired as she was, it was a long time before she could go to sleep. -- Mary Kuhner 2/21/91 mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu Article 33004 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!caen!dali.cs.montana.edu!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 24 Message-ID: <17124@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 25 Feb 91 17:01:25 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu Reply-To: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 126 24. Honor The whisk of her door opening woke Jayhawk from a heavy sleep. She slung her toolkit over her shoulder and went to investigate, still in her nightgown. Outside lay a long, curving corridor which she had seen once before. She frowned, biting her lip. She didn't feel particularly wide-awake or particularly eager for company. But there might be something to learn; and in any case, she had promised Slim. The door at the passage's end was the same, and the musky darkness beyond it. She walked in, stood listening. "Are you still interested in the Overnet?" said the soft, broken voice, not quite where she had expected it. "Yes. Or maybe interested is the wrong word. I don't know enough to be interested. Curious." The darkness seemed to make the dreamy, not-quite -awake feeling worse. "Can I sit down?" "There is a chair behind you." She groped for it as the voice went on, "What will you do there, Jayhawk? Where will you go?" It seemed to be speaking more to itself than to her. "I don't know." "What are you? What are you doing here?" "I don't know!" she snarled. "You should be able to answer those questions, you've been watching me hard enough. Why am I here? Why are you offering me this?" "To ease the pain, child," it whispered. "I don't know what I could tell you that you don't already know by now." "Information," it mused. "Is that what I need? Will that let me understand you? I think not." "I can tell you," she said in defiant anger, "roughly what must have happened--the intent, if not the details. We'd run Aliantha and her bodyguard to ground, and we intended to kill them. I imagine I found a way to do it. For my friends, for all the people whose lives she'd destroyed." And your turn is coming. "Vengeance? Is that what moved you?" She looked down, suddenly abashed. "I'm not a big fan of vengeance. But it had to be done, to stop them." "A matter of honor?" She snorted. "I've seen what honor gets you. Roth was an honorable man." "Is that honor?" There was a huge shifting in the room around her, quicker and more powerful than it had seemed before. She froze, a tiny island of stillness in the maelstrom. "Honor. Preservation of one's life. Which is paramount, Jayhawk?" She wanted to say: Can you destroy Paradisio, is that what you are hinting at? *Do it.* It's worth our lives. She couldn't say it. "Words," she muttered. "Honor, survival. You can't take them in isolation and put them on a balance. A living person, a decision to make, that's what's real.--That's what they taught me in college, anyway." "Situational ethics." "Whatever you want to call it." A moment's silence. Its voice when it spoke suggested something short of breath, but between sentences there was no sound of breathing at all. "Tell me about Ratty. Is he an honorable man? Is it worthwhile, this...." Very carefully, she said, "If I willingly told you about him, it would be betrayal. No." Her own kind of honor, such as it was....She considered her choice of words, winced at it. 'Willingly.' She knew, and they doubtless knew as well, that there was no question she would not answer, given drugs or threats or simple pain. "I see." Another long silence. "You should go back to sleep." She got up, leaned on the back of the chair. "I--I promised to ask this, I think you're the right one to ask. Slim...wanted me to say that he would still like to have fur." "Fur." Almost a chuckle. "Pleasant dreams, Jayhawk." The door slid open behind her. "You too," she said with a barely-suppressed snarl, suspecting irony, and turned and walked out, not looking back. She climbed back into bed thinking that she wouldn't be able to sleep...quickly found that she'd been mistaken. Her dreams were of great masses sliding past her in the darkness. Nothing more. She woke a little tired, ran herself a hot bath. Sitting in the steaming, rose-scented water, pondering the night's events, she came to three conclusions. It was good to be tired again, to wake up slowly with coffee and steam, not be flung awake by some convulsion of her reaction wiring. It had seemed natural enough at the time, but she appreciated now what it had cost her nerves. She owed the creature that spoke in the darkness--*was* it Merrow, the dead High Priest? she rather thought so--a more sincere thank-you. It had warded her dreams. And something was nagging at her, some missed nuance of the encounter. She pegged it down at last over coffee and donuts. The room she'd awakened to, when she went out to speak with Merrow, had been emblazoned with the orange and gold wall hangings of her Matrix node. But the room she had returned to after their conversation had not. -- Mary Kuhner 2/25/91 Article 33630 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!rpi!batcomputer!llenroc!cornell!uw-beaver!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 25 Message-ID: <17838@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 6 Mar 91 19:11:03 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu Reply-To: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 103 25. Decision Jayhawk was working on the Matrix, stringing together detection code, when the 'door' buzzed. "Come in," she said, amused, and Martha entered the node. "Morning! How are you feeling?" "All right." Jayhawk filed away her project, sat back. "What's up?" "If you'd still like to learn the Overnet, Doc will have to make some adjustments to your cyberware. Just minor surgery, nothing to worry about. We should make an appointment--as soon as possible would be best." "Martha," said Jayhawk, not looking at her, "you told me once that it wasn't safe to let me run around on the Matrix, I might get hurt. But here I am. *What's changed?*" "It's the complex," said Martha brightly, and at Jayhawk's raised eyebrow went on, "I imagine it's handling passcodes, shielding you from anything that might hurt you. Don't go through any locked doors, okay?" Jayhawk had spent a substantial part of the morning inventorying locked doors, contemplating how to unlock them. She'd also crafted a small interface plug, the last necessary step to using the code she and Kurt had written. She said nothing. "You don't look like you slept very well," said Martha, regarding her critically. "This could wait, if you're not feeling up to it." "Just out of curiosity, what would happen if I said no?" Martha frowned. "Then...you'd say no." Jayhawk laughed bitterly. "That's a good answer.--All right. As soon as possible, then." "Jayhawk, you're being silly. We are *not* going to kill you." "I imagine not. I'm quite an investment." Martha snorted in exasperation. "That's not all you are. I don't know about you, but *I've* enjoyed our conversations. And I appreciate your help--there's always a thousand things to fix around here, more of these widgets are broken than working. In about three hours, then?" "Can you explain what you're going to do?" "I can try...." She conjured a chair out of nowhere, sat down heavily, and launched into a discussion which Jayhawk could only tenuously follow. Some of it was clear enough: they planned to retune her cyberware, allow usage of, if not its full capabilities, at least a less restricted subset. (Her testing of the headware suggested no such restrictions, but it was not hard to believe she might be wrong.) But other aspects....Martha was talking about dangers from the Matrix, certain configurations which must be avoided, and it made no sense to Jayhawk. Worse, was obvious nonsense. She asked questions, probed at the weakest bits of the story, to little effect. How did such-and-such physical layout increase one's vulnerability? If the dangers were there, weren't they there, period? But the answer went right over her head. At last Martha rose. "That's the best I can do. I have quite a lot of work piled up, do you mind?" "Um--If you're going to be working, I could help. I would rather...rather have company right now, if you don't mind." "Goodness, of course not." Martha smiled tentatively. "We should jog, you know." "On the *Matrix*?" "You never know. It can't hurt--" She was out the door before Jay could reply. No place on the Matrix is more than fifteen seconds from anywhere else; Jay stepped out the door expecting to be in Martha's node instantly. And found herself blocked, held to a snail's pace. She snorted, tried to work around the restraining code, rapidly discovered that Martha was responsible--and that she wasn't going to get past it, though she spent the entire jog trying, absorbed for the moment in the challenge. Three hours of small talk, trying to find absorption in that, in the trivial repair jobs; then they jogged back. Suddenly remembering the interface plug, Jayhawk jacked out, meaning to hide it among the clutter of electronics. As she had half suspected, Martha was physically present. She made no comment as Jayhawk put away her deck, hid the plug with assumed casualness. "Lie down on the bed, please, and count backwards from 100. Doc will be here in a little bit, but we might as well get started." She linked a thin cable to the wall, plugged it into the nonstandard socket behind Jay's datajack, then began to putter about, describing what she was doing in a soft cheery voice. Somewhere around 48 the room flickered, faded, vanished. -- Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu Article 33636 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!zephyr.ens.tek.com!uw-beaver!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 26 Message-ID: <17846@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 6 Mar 91 21:19:48 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu Reply-To: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 191 26. Key As if in a dream, Jayhawk found herself walking the curving corridor, entering a familiar darkness. The air was heavy with a sickly animal smell. She took a few paces forward, stopped. "Jayhawk." The voice was different somehow. Harsher, less pained. "Do you wish to learn the Overnet?" She nodded, certain that she was seen. "Why?" "I'm a prisoner. Whatever chance there is to affect my fate, I have to take it--I have to try *something*." "Is that how you see yourself? A prisoner?" It sounded disappointed. "How else?" In a rush, "If you don't want me to feel like a prisoner, you could always let me go." It sighed softly. "You are your own jailer; you make your own cell. Where will you go, afterwards? Will you go back to Seattle? Your friends will not accept you, you know." "I know." She had not faced it until this moment, but it was true. They would say that she had been corrupted by Paradisio, couldn't be trusted...they would be right, wouldn't they? Tracers in her skull to find her, and who knows what programming in her mind, what betrayals. "Where, then? What will you do?" "It's hard to think about that, since I can't believe you're going to let me go." "Consider it as a hypothetical, then." "I'd probably go back to Seattle. It's home." "Everywhere on the Matrix will be home to you. Why Seattle? Why not London, Moscow, Bangkok? Pretoria?" Did it stress the last word, just a little? She knew Duende had been contemplating Pretoria as his next target. "Why not Seattle?" "Because it will *hurt*." It was silent a moment. "What will you do with Seattle?" She licked her lips, said sharply, "Maybe I'll try to undo the harm my predecessor did. Clean things up a little." "You have improvements in mind?" This was crazy, this whole conversation was crazy. "Why should I? I like the Matrix the way it is." "You will freeze things as they are, then?" "If you freeze something it dies. Why should I? Why should I meddle at all?" A whisper of laughter in the darkness. "Why, indeed?" And then, harsher and with a tone of command, "Show me what you will do, Jayhawk." The darkness shattered around her. She was on the Matrix, a telecom node--in Seattle, she realized, a place she'd run a dozen times. Two nodes from the SAN of the Paradisian base. There was a terrible impulse to run, lose herself in the Matrix--run to Osiris, her old system, to the ghost node, *anywhere*. She checked it. Illusion, this was all illusion--or even if it was not, her body was in Paradisio. She wasn't going to escape without it. "Show me what you will make," whispered a voice from nowhere. "I don't understand!" she snarled back. "What do you want?" She certainly wasn't going to share her knowledge of the Seattle Matrix with *it*. There was a heavy rumbling, ripples in the scene around her; abruptly it vanished, leaving only darkness. The rumbling continued; she stood still as unseen masses scraped past. It didn't sound as smooth as it had before. "I'm sorry," whispered the voice. "Ahhh....Do you know, Jayhawk, that I cannot die? I can be twisted, stretched, constrained, reduced almost to nothing. But not die." "I'm sorry," she whispered. "Man did this to me. Why, Jayhawk?" "There's no such thing as Man. Just people, individual people." It went on as if it had not heard. "Man torments. Burns the forests, cuts into the mountains, drills for oil and spills it on the sea....*Why*, Jayhawk?" "No one reason. Man doesn't exist. Thousands of reasons, good, bad, indifferent....So that people like me can run the Matrix. That's one." "So people like you can run the Matrix, exist in a pale shadow of reality...." Its tone was scornful. Angry, she cut across its words. "Why are you doing this? Why are you offering this to me?" "I already told you, child. To ease the pain. Maybe to end it." "Is that what you tried with the others you've done this to, Aliantha and the rest? Did it work?" "No. But I have never tried what I am trying with you." There was a sudden heavy clink at her feet. "There is the key to the Overnet. What will you do with it?" She stooped reflexively, picked up a heavy metal bar with an elaborate flange at one end, a ring at the other. "I don't know." "Why did you ask about the fur?" She stood clutching the key. It was bitter cold. "Because Slim wanted me to. A kindness for a kindness." "Slim is a good man. There are so few left nowadays." Bitterly, she said, "And you destroy them when you find them, don't you?" "Are you a good woman, Jayhawk?" "I don't know," she said after a long moment. "Honest. That is good. But the Overnet is cruel, crueller if you don't know yourself. Are you ready for this?" "Martha seems to think so." "Martha doesn't know you. Keep hold of the key. The first trip will be a bad one." She whispered into the darkness, "Please, if you can tell me anything about what's going to happen....I know words aren't much good. But it would be something to hold onto. Even half an explanation is better than none." "I cannot. Your mind is not ready for it yet, your body is not strong enough. Perhaps soon." It hesistated. "Perhaps I can show you a little." A spotlight sprang up, dazzling in the darkness. It illuminated a canopied bed, closer than she would have guessed from the voice. It was surrounded with a mass of life-support equipment, telltales twinkling. *Illusion,* she thought. The blinking lights would have been visible before, if they'd really been there. She stepped forward, raised a hand to the closed curtain, waiting to be stopped. "Go ahead," whispered the voice, very close now. She pulled the curtain back with a rattling of rings. Within, cradled in machinery, lay.... A transparent skin in the shape of a man. The legs were filled with a greenish-brown mass, swirling softly and continuously, the vaguest hint of bones submerged, half-dissolved in it. Only a suggestion of feet. The torso was better preserved, internal organs visible, but splayed apart, pushed aside by burgeoning growths springing up everywhere. Filaments of sickly brown, bulging greenish tumors. A madman's garden sprouting in what had been human flesh. The head was still almost normal: a young man, sharp-featured, with skin pale from long confinement. Where hair should have been there were feathers, crimson and green. His eyes were squeezed tightly shut against the light, features contorted in pain; sweat trickled down into the machinery. "Turn the light off," said Jayhawk, her breath catching in her throat. "Don't cause yourself more pain on my account. I've seen enough." She wanted to say something else--I'm sorry. Can I help? I would kill you if I could. The words wouldn't come. "Leave," it hissed from the sudden darkness. She pulled the curtain shut with trembling hands, backed away. If she began to run she'd hurt herself. She walked out the door and fell, headlong into the reaching dark. -- Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu Article 33668 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!uwm.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!dali.cs.montana.edu!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 27 Message-ID: <17906@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 7 Mar 91 14:44:21 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu Reply-To: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 183 27. Door Two forces were at work in her mind; Jayhawk watched them, unable to do anything else, and tried to understand. One was trying to strengthen her, shore up weaknesses that she could barely perceive. Something was wrong with its efforts, jarringly wrong; and it was not succeeding. She knew. The other, Aliantha, was weaving barriers, trying to cut her off from something outside--from the Matrix? Abruptly a third presence impinged on her mind, trying to enter, trying to reach her. The one who defended made changes in a frantic whirl of activity--threw open floodgates, called up resources she hadn't known she possessed. A wild outpouring of strength. All thrown against the new invader. All in vain. In equal desperation Aliantha struggled to reverse what she had done, make contact with something outside. Useless. In terror, Jayhawk threw her strength behind the one who defended, fearing the known intrusion less than the unknown. The outsider brushed away her efforts, reached in toward the essential center of her, within the walls of headware and code, thought and memory. Broke through, touched her-- She woke with a cry, the memory of a face in her mind's eye, and found Martha sitting by the bedside, watching her with concern. "Are you all right? Nightmares?" "Yes," Jayhawk breathed. "Oh yes." "You've been out for two days. We were beginning to worry. You *are* hard to heal." "I didn't hurt you, did I?" At Martha's puzzled frown she went on, "I've seen mages hurt themselves trying to heal me. Too much cyberware." "Ah, no, nothing like that.--Would you like to talk about it? Would you like to go out? Maybe a bike ride?" "I'm not sure my legs will hold me, after two days in bed." "They will. You shouldn't be unsteady at all--please tell me if you are! Isometrics," she added with a conspiratorial smile. "That sounds good. Let me go wash, then." Her hair was plastered to her head, her clothes foul with cold sweat. She got up without assistance, shut herself in the bathroom. Staring into the mirror as if it were a window, she finally managed to place the face in the nightmare. She had seen it among Aliantha's records when they'd taken her main base. Marianne Cabe. A monster now, a victim of one of Aliantha's experiments. Queen of the Ghouls. But where the face in the holo had been smiling, her memory was of waxen stillness, almost without expression. Almost. She couldn't understand it at all. She washed her face briskly, changed into clean clothes, and accompanied Martha to the bike bay, still wondering. Jacked into the bike-- A glory of sensation, perceptions far keener than the human, power bound to exquisite control. She spun forward, down the ramp like a star falling in splendor, hit the ground with a surge like diving into water--sweet water, so sweet! Somewhere inside she was fighting to keep a fraction of attention from the bike, watch for intruders. It was impossibly hard. "Tell me about these nightmares," said Martha's voice in her ear. "I talked with the complex in my dreams." Hard even to focus on Martha's voice. Had she planned it that way? "That's good. You were going to have to, sooner or later. Did he give you a key?" "Yes. What does it mean?" Martha chuckled. "I'd almost say he has a sense of humor, almost.... There's a door that key fits into. You'll find it if you look. It means you're allowed the Overnet." They were whipping through moonlit forest, a thousand sensations blending into one--the feel of the road underneath her wheels, the engine's hum, the smell of the forest. It woke terrible memories, that last; she tried to block it out, and it faded at once. "Martha, did you know much about what Aliantha was doing in Seattle?" "A little bit. We talked it over once or twice." "Why did she create the Minerva Project?" Marianne's damnation, the hivemind of the ghouls. "The--Oh. Yes. I don't know, Jay. She always had to know how things worked, always had to try each little change to see what it would do. And then another, and another, and another." "It's like programming, isn't it--genetics?" Wind flowing along her chassis, fingering her hair, liquid as moonlight. "Why wasn't she in Seattle--why didn't she go back when things started to go wrong?" "She was with *him.* I don't know where they went; I didn't follow them. It almost seemed as if...as if he needed her, somehow, though of course that's not....I don't know why exactly." "That kind of pain," said Jayhawk somberly, "seems to demand a response." "Yes. Yes, it does." Martha slowed, came to a stop under a spreading tree; Jay followed suit. "I'm sorry, Jayhawk," she said. "I need some time by myself; I don't get out much anymore, not often enough....Is that all right? I'll see you tomorrow morning." "Sure." "Jay?" Martha looked back at her. It struck Jayhawk that if the experience were the same, that must take an intense effort of will; it was hard to move independently of the bike, defying its balance. "That key you have? It might be a good idea not to use it quite yet. I can talk to you tomorrow morning, maybe help you a little bit." "It might," said Jayhawk. Martha's head snapped back around, and she took off with blinding suddenness, a speed that Jay wasn't sure she could have matched. Her perceptions followed the bike for a long way among the trees, the image slowly fading. Just before it vanished, Jayhawk thought for a moment that she wasn't seeing Martha any longer; only the machine. She rode back, the exultation of speed almost keeping the confusion in her thoughts at bay, and parked the bike in the bay. Slim was waiting for her. "Don't worry about Martha," he said. "She just needs to be alone sometimes, that's all." It had been the furthest thing from her thoughts. "I asked--about the fur. I don't know if it did any good. I don't think so." Slim only nodded. They walked back to the room in silence. Jayhawk spent the next two hours exhaustively testing her cyberware. She was faster, intuition told her; and the readings confirmed it, though the difference was so subtle that she was surprised to be able to perceive it directly. Other than that, nothing seemed to have changed. At last she stood in the middle of her Matrix room, closed her eyes for a moment, searching within. Intuition, again. It was correct. When she opened them again there was another door leading out of the room: tall, ornate, bordered with an elaborate abstract frieze. She spent a little while just looking at it, probing with analysis code. It told her nothing. Her thoughts were in turmoil. Desire. Curiosity, painful in its intensity, almost physically do. Guilt, horror at herself--what was she doing, cooperating with the Paradisian's wishes, desiring what they offered? Intense loneliness. It was true what the speaker in darkness had said. She could never go back to her friends, her former life. It was like admitting that that person no longer existed.--And who did she define herself by now? No one exists in a vacuum. 'A kindness for a kindness.' Like an executive in a ruthless corporation, was that what she would become?--hating it, but part of it nonetheless? How could she accept what they offered, her enemies? How could she not? She took the key out of her satchel, unsurprised to find it there, and turned it over in her hands. It was a Matrix construct, but analysis told her no more. Wait until morning, hear what Martha had to say....the advice of Paradisio on how to deal with this gift she was to be given. Wasn't that the best plan? Martha wanted her to live. She reached a decision, not saying even to herself what it was; and stepped forward, turned the key in the lock, walked through. -- Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu Article 33742 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!dali.cs.montana.edu!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 28 Keywords: long Message-ID: <18022@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 8 Mar 91 17:20:27 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu Reply-To: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 298 28. Reunion Anticlimatically, the door to the Overnet opened onto nothing more than six meters of bare corridor and another door. Across it at eye level was printed neatly, "Everything has a price." Below that were two black-outlined boxes, one labelled "Yes," the other "No." The doorhandle was in the box marked "Yes." She turned the handle, walked through. It opened into another corridor, one ending in sudden darkness. There was writing on the back side of the door too, scrawled in dark ink. "Anything can be bought." She walked forward, stared into the blackness; it was opaque. Slid a hand along the wall; the darkness was like a curtain, cutting off vision at once, but she could feel the wall bend backwards, barely a centimeter thick. Matrix trickery, she thought. She stepped through, hoping to find it no more than a curtain, and was pleased to find herself correct. She was standing inside a high brick dome, brightly lit by no visible source. In its center a man was sitting on an ornate wooden chair; behind him another archway opened into darkness. There was nothing else in the chamber. She took a step forward, staring at the man--was he IC? The Paradisians were fond of such tricks. He was wearing an elaborate robe of green and blue and red, jewel-like colors with the dull gleam of velvet. South American, she thought, dark-skinned and hawk-nosed, with eyes set deep. Familiar, although she could put no name to him. The creature in the canopied bed? She tried mentally to substitute feathers for hair, couldn't decide. He looked up sharply at her approach. "Jayhawk." The voice was familiar too. "I've been waiting a long time for you." A little exasperated, she said, "Hello. I don't think we've been introduced." He laughed. "No, I guess we never were, not properly." "What do you want?" She walked toward him until they were only a few meters apart, stood with her hands on her hips. "A man once asked me," he said thoughtfully, "what faith is. I couldn't tell him. Can you tell me, Jayhawk?" She opened her mouth to answer, stopped short. "If you are speaking with a spirit," Channa had told her once, "if you even *suspect* you are speaking with a spirit, tell the truth. It's dangerous, but less so than a lie. And remember that what you say matters, every word." "Faith is taking something as real, making it real to you," she said slowly. "Like the difference between the Matrix and a stimsense illusion. If you have faith in something you accept it as real, you can trust your weight to it." She stamped hard on a brick. "If you lose that, you don't have anywhere to stand." "Taking it as real." He seemed to ponder that. "What do you have faith in? Your friends?" "My friends. Myself, maybe. The Matrix. That's real." "What do you think of sanity? Is it useful?" At her hesitation he went on, "Or maybe this is a better way to put it. What do you think of honor? Is it relevant? The same question, I think." It did not seem so to her. "I'm not sure about honor," she said. "Roth was an honorable man, everyone said so. But I think maybe that just meant he had one rule he put ahead of everything else. And that's not being good, that's just letting a rule do part of your thinking for you. Preprocessing. Sanity....what do you mean by useful? Useful for what?" It had been useful enough to her allies that the Paradisians were not sane. He tipped his head sideways, looked at her. "What will you do after this?" "I am getting so *sick* of being asked that!" she said with force. "I don't know! How could I?" "Ah, but you do." He smiled at her exasperation. "Why do you think Aliantha died?" "I have some...imaginings. I don't know. I've imagined that she might have been told she couldn't die until she found a successor." He frowned thoughtfully. "Interesting. But I don't think so. Her immortality was always fleeting." "I don't understand." "Aliantha wished to live forever. The human body cannot do that, and so she abandoned it. But I don't think she ever adapted to the change, not really. No, Jayhawk. That's not it." "How can I guess? I only met her once." He frowned. "Is that lost? Ah well. Perhaps it will return." "Do I not remember all there is to remember?" He only smiled. "Perhaps," she ventured, thinking of the creature at the center of the complex, "she thought I could do something she couldn't." "You can do a great many things she couldn't....She sacrificed her life for you. Does that make her your friend?" "No, not necessarily.--Why did she do it?" "Does that matter?" "Of course it does!" She realized that she was being baited, tried a question in return. "What price did *you* pay to be here?" "A bullet through the eye," he said calmly, "two through the chest, one in the abdomen that ruptured the spleen, one in the left leg just above the knee." "Ouch," she said inanely. "It was really very quick." "I imagine so. But--with just a few exceptions, everyone dies. What makes you so special? What are you doing here?" "Asking you questions. Seeing if you're ready for this." "Do I pass?" He smiled, pressed his fingertips together. The gesture was exasperatingly familiar. "Who *are* you?" "You don't know?" He sounded disappointed. "It's on the tip of my tongue--" Memory, suddenly, Duende's passionless account of the night's violence. She hadn't been there, had been guarding Channa while she wove her sending. Gunfire from ambush...."Oh god!" "Yes," he chuckled. "No, I shouldn't tease. That's not it. Do you know who I am now?" "Lefty." They had shot him from hiding and tumbled his naked body into the lake, mutilated beyond hope of recovery; and Ratty had conjured his ghost and demanded the killcodes, the words that destroyed every low-ranking Paradisian in Seattle. And he had given them, and laughed. He had shot her from ambush and collected her blood for his masters; kidnapped her and left the patterns in her mind that destroyed Osiris system, nearly convinced Duende and the others that she could no longer be trusted. "We drew lines in the sand," he said softly, "but they crumbled away." Lines on the street, marking the end of the 'safe zone', sniper-rifle fire from the rooftops when they were crossed. "And we wrote email back and forth. I was the only one, the only one who thought that was funny." She was giggling, almost hysterically. "My state of mind at the time didn't allow me to see the humor in it either. I have a better perspective now." She looked up, demanded in a voice full of passion, "What were you trying to do at Osiris?" "I was trying to create something." His voice was suddenly sad. She snorted, fought her hysteria under control. "Trashed my system pretty good, that's what you did." A thought struck her. "What happened at the Hidden Fortress, do you know?" "An explosion of truly epic proportions. Yoichi was very upset." "It's lucky he wasn't in the blast. What happened--self-destruct?" He smiled at her, a wide delighted smile. "Jayhawk," he said softly, sharing the joke, "*you were in control of a CPU.*" At that the giggles burst through restraint, close to tears. "You son of a bitch," she choked out. It was so obviously true, now that it was pointed out. She'd known the programming was still in her mind, she'd just never thought that the Hidden Fortress machine, so different from her own Osiris, would trigger it....never really believed it was beyond her control, that was it. "Did you plan that, did you plan to destroy the Hidden Fortress?" Serious now, he said, "You couldn't handle the power. Your body wasn't prepared for it, you didn't have the wiring, the training. I had no time to teach you. And here you are now. Still untrained...." He raised his hands, brought them sharply together. "Jayhawk? Boom. You're dead." She remembered the note he'd left in her motorcycle tailpipe, the deadly game they'd played. Deadly at last to him. "It doesn't seem to slow your kind down much, does it?" She didn't believe that she was dead. No. Not possible. "Some of us had special help." "So here I am. Revenge? Are you pleased?" "Revenge is quite meaningless here. Pleased....Does it matter?--Do you have faith in your friends, Jayhawk?" "Yes," she said cautiously. "Do you know what they've been doing?" "No." And I wouldn't tell you if I did. "They've rescued a great many people." At her smile of grim satisfaction, he went on, "But why not you?" "I doubt they even know I'm alive, I doubt very much they could reach me." "One at least has the power to find you, the power to reach you." He was speaking of Ratty, she realized: Ratty the summoner of ghosts. "There are more important things than me. I'm just a very small part of reality." She shook her hair back, stared at him levelly. "I wouldn't ask them to endanger themselves. I knew the risks when I made the run." He bowed his head. "What do you think of them, what they're doing?" "I won't talk about that." "No? Don't want to think about it?" he said maliciously. "It's what they'd want of me." "Is it? Very well.--What do you think of Aliantha's choice? Did she choose well?" "How can I tell? I don't know what she wanted, I don't know what she chose--besides death." A thin shiver of pride, that *she* had been chosen.... "She stood where you stand once, and made a decision--" He glanced behind him at the black archway. "And great power was hers." "And she went completely crazy and made monsters and let them loose in the sewers. No thanks." "You would choose differently, then?" "I hope so." "Good," he said with satisfaction. "What do you think of Marianne the Queen?" Jayhawk bit her lip, wondering at that question. "I've fought her people; they tried to kill me, I tried to kill them. I guess that makes us enemies in a pretty straightforward way." It was probably not that straightforward. Nothing here seemed to be. "My turn. Why me, why are you doing this?" With a vulpine grin, he said, "As you say, I don't think I should answer that." His grin widened at her expression. "What will you do, Jayhawk? Once you step through that door--" again the glance behind "--all power will be yours." A thrill went through her, a physical stab from heart to groin. "I don't believe you. If 'everything has a price', the price for infinite power would be infinite, and you couldn't squeeze it out of me." He laughed softly. "Just so." And then, wholly serious again: "I should not tell you what you want to know. But...." He rose gracefully, robes swirling about him. "You are a remarkable woman, Jayhawk, in a number of ways." His gaze lingered on her, appreciative and regretful. "But I serve my Lord. Now as always." He bowed deeply to her and vanished. The chair was gone too, leaving nothing but an empty brick dome. Jayhawk sat down on the brick floor, patted it as if to reassure herself of its solidity, and wrapped her arms around her head. She was very close to giggles or sobs, she wasn't sure which. *He* had destroyed the Hidden Fortress, all her cleverness accomplishing no more than giving him access. Weeks after his death. And the dreams....Memories of her kidnapping, was that it? The two hours she'd been in Lefty's hands, before her friends rescued her? She hadn't realized that she'd been in Aliantha's hands too. Aliantha had been in Paradisio. But of course that was no barrier. On the Matrix, no place was more than fifteen seconds from anywhere else. Her fate had been decided then, the rescue an irrelevant detail. Eventually she collected herself, settled the satchel over her shoulder, and walked into the darkness beyond where the chair had been. Not holding to the wall anymore. Head high, and eyes wide. -- Mary Kuhner 3/7/91 Article 33988 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!decwrl!ogicse!unicorn!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Jayhawk 29 Message-ID: <18348@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 13 Mar 91 23:51:43 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu Reply-To: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 162 29. Marianne The ghoul's head broke water; Ratty sucked in a deep breath, let out a squeal as he was unceremoniously dropped onto something rubbery and dry. Droplets showered him as the creature dove again. He wrapped his arms around himself, shivering violently, and tried to take stock of his surroundings. The water on his lips was salt. Under the Sound, then. Sometime since his capture he'd lost his sense of direction; he couldn't guess where along the waterfront he might be. It was pitch dark. The echoes of his breathing suggested a large but enclosed space. The air was bitter cold, and full of a strange smell, antiseptic covering an ancient slow corruption. The surface beneath him was smooth and faintly yielding, like a thick layer of rubber. A voice spoke out of the darkness, distant and cold. It woke no echoes. "So. There you are." He could not judge if it were male or female. Female, probably. The Queen of the Ghouls. He considered assensing, and as if in reply she went on, "Do not try to see me. You would be dead before your eyes ever opened in the True World." "I understand," he whispered. The sound of his voice hissed back at him from distant walls, a ceiling several times his own height. "I thought that it might be different, seeing you myself. But it isn't." It might have been a woman's voice once, but something had drained it of all expression, all life. "No different at all." "What do you want with me?" He curled into the smallest ball he could imagine, clutching his warmth to himself. His skin ached with gooseflesh. "Why are you doing this? What do you intend?' It was not the question he had expected. Haltingly, he explained his bargain with the ghosts, his decision to oppose Paradisio, the powers he had summoned to his aid. The Spider. No matter how he strained his night-adapted eyes, there was no trace of light; no sound of motion except the faint lapping of water behind him. He could form no stable image of the one who spoke to him--a human woman, puffed and destorted by the ghoul-plague? something huge and motionless like a white grub? something not corporeal at all? "Why should I allow you to do this?" Ratty licked dry lips, said, "If you take me, you will be bound by the oaths I have sworn." He was not at all sure he believed it. "I think not." A long pause; he tried to think of a way to escape, without success. "I cannot take you at all. I cannot even kill you. But I can make you disappear utterly, so that it will be as if you never were. Why should I not do this?" "Perhaps we have a common enemy. I have sworn vengeance against Montaigne Paradisio. Not against you." "What do you think of me?" Again he was surprised. "I don't like predators, but I understand their place in the City. I don't threaten you, if you don't threaten me or mine. I don't deny your right to exist." A ghost of cold laughter, felt more than heard. "A predator. That is not what I am, not exactly.--*Why should I let you go?* Tell me that." "Maybe I could help you in some way, if my other obligations let me. I can't promise." "I do not need any more servants." "I can do things your servants can't." His skin itched where the ghoul had touched him. The plague was not transmissable that way, Grant had told him; but he wondered. "You can bring a new power into the City. This disturbs me." "Is the Spider your enemy, then? Why?" "It is beyond my control," she said. Moved by an impulse he did not understand, Ratty said, "Great One, may I come closer? I swear I will not hurt you." "No," she said at once. "Stay where you are." He sat back--he had been ready to get up, to walk or crawl toward her--and tried to think of something to say. "If you kill me, won't another take my place, if this is the will of the spirits?" "I will not kill you. And I do not think you would be so easily replaced." "I am only a man." "You are not even quite a man. But in this matter you are a focus, with importance beyond your own abilities. No one else can do what you will do." He considered that, arms wrapped around him to stop the shivering. He was sitting in a small cold puddle; he scooted forward, trying to find a drier spot, then froze as he realized what he was doing. "I will not do what the Spider askes," he offered, "if I decide that it is wrong." "Will you not?" "I have free will, I do the spirits' bidding by choice." A shiver of voiceless laughter. "I have a prince--a knight in shining armor, as he likes to style himself--who would say the same." Ratty bowed his head, unable to answer. "Why should I not make you disappear?" At last it occured to him that she was asking because she wanted to know: not probing for threats or bargains, but asking for explanations. He mused on that. "I see things in a way you do not, a way your servants cannot. You will lose that if I am gone." "Do you offer me your wisdom, to advise me?" A hint of sarcasm. "No," he whispered. "Only other eyes to see, eyes of one not your servant, without your blindnesses. If you want, I will promise to return to you and tell you what I have seen." She was silent. "Great One," he said, "might I come closer?" "No." And then, relenting a little, "It is better for both of us if you do not." He felt a strange rush of disappointment, inexplicable as the impulse itself. "I think," he said softly, "I think you have many servants, but few to speak to you." "I am never alone." A stirring in the darkness, something not physical. He thought of slain ghouls who had once been men, wondered if she spoke with her own ghosts. "That makes it worse, doesn't it?" He wanted to say more, didn't dare. A long cold silence. "So," she said at last. "Go and do what you must. I will come to you." Whatever he had imagined, it was nothing that could move. Was she a spirit herself? No kind of spirit he knew. But it seemed to him that she who spoke was not human, had never been human, despite whatever might remain in her of the woman Marianne. Suddenly, cold hands reached out of the water, seized him. He was drawn under before he could struggle, cast out choking and bedraggled on a deserted stretch of waterfront in the cold light of early dawn. In North Seattle, miles from the place where he'd been taken. -- Mary Kuhner 3/13/91 Article 33987 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!swrinde!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!decwrl!ogicse!unicorn!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 30 Message-ID: <18350@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 13 Mar 91 23:52:36 GMT References: <18348@milton.u.washington.edu> Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu Reply-To: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 142 30. Bandit Jayhawk found herself in a narrow, cobbled alley, a light rain settling to slick the stones underfoot. She was wearing--she shook out her clothes in puzzlement--some kind of long, archaic dress, heavily ruffled. Carrying an umbrella. No satchel of software, no key. *This is illusion*, she decided, biting her lip. The alternative hypothesis--that something had enough power over her to arbitrarily change her Matrix image--didn't appeal to her at all. The alley opened up ahead into a narrow street, barely visible from here. Behind her was a solid brick wall. She swung the umbrella over one arm, walked forward. A man stepped around the corner, stood slouching in the alley, blocking her way. He too was archaically dressed, knee-length pants ending in sodden white ruffles, velvet tunic, black wool cloak dangling from one shoulder. There was a large sword slung across his back on an embroidered strap. She peered at his face, trying to decide who he was, but it was unfamiliar: he was European, fair-skinned and brown-haired, with bright brown eyes under arching eyebrows. "Hello, Jayhawk," he said. "Everyone knows who I am!" she said in annoyance. "Who are you?" He shook his head, said almost pleadingly, "Can't you just call me the Masked Bandit?" "You've forgotten your mask," she pointed out. "So I have." He leaned against the wall, staring at her, blocking her exit. She took a few tentative steps forward, decided he wasn't going to move aside. She was tired of the mind games, tired of trying to guess what was happening. She leaned against the wall too, staring back. He was imperturbable. After a few minutes her patience ran out. "I haven't got anything worth your while to steal." She waved the umbrella contemptuously. He grinned. "My lady, any man would wish to steal what you possess." "Oh, give me a break!" she said, a little too loudly, and glared at him. "What do you want? Is this another test?" He sighed, his face suddenly serious. "I will be quick, then. These are the questions I am to ask: Who are you?" "Jayhawk." "No more than that?" "No." It seemed to her suddenly that by saying it she was making it true: Caroline Davies didn't exist any longer. "I don't belong to any corporation, I don't owe allegiance to any big overreaching organization, what else can I say? Just Jayhawk." "It will look odd in the records," he mused, "but well enough. Why do you seek the Overnet?" She bridled a little, tiring of the same questions over and over, but said steadily, "How could I not? It's knowledge, knowledge of the Matrix, that's what I *do*. And I'm a prisoner, I have to try whatever road seems to lead to escape, and this was the only one left to me." Was it? whispered something inside. Or only the easiest, the most tempting? "What power--excuse me, what knowledge--do you seek?" She licked her lips. "I have seen you people do things on the Matrix that are impossible. Going around the rules. Making Gates, crossing between nodes without accesses, barriers I can't crack, attacks I can't defend. Cheating. I want to understand that. I want to know how the Gates work, how they relate to the Matrix. How your decking code works, how it's written." "And what price are you willing to pay for this knowledge?" "Never to work with my allies again, never to be trusted by them," she said softly. "I know I've paid that already. Beyond that--How can I know? I don't know what could be asked." "What do you hold back, then? What price is too high?" "I will not serve Paradisio," she said fiercely. "I will not betray my friends." "Is there anything else?" "I don't want to lose myself." "Don't want to, or will not?" "Will not." If I have a choice. "And I don't want to lose the Matrix. That's precious to me." "Don't want to?" "Will not. That price would be too high." "Is there anything else?" She thought for a moment. "I don't want to end up like the creature in the center of the complex--in pain, wanting to die, unable to." "No one would," he said softly. "Yeah, well, you asked. Might as well say it clearly, maybe that'll help me keep to it.--Do you find my answers satisfactory?" "I am here only to record them. Afterwards I will retain neither memory nor understanding; so it hardly matters what I think." A construct, she thought. AI. "Are you done, then?" "Is there anything else, any other price you will not pay?" She thought of Slim's hideousness, the naked flesh of Doc's hands, the seething horror of the complex-creature. Aliantha's renunciation of the flesh. Other horrors, vaguely grasped from Duende's descriptions. I don't want to be horrible, I don't want to become a monster. "No," she said softly but with certainty. "Very well." He bowed to her, not deeply. "Remember your answers, Jayhawk. You will need them." And sank through the cobblestones like a wraith, leaving no trace. She winced, looking down at the pavement underfoot. It was the metaphor she had chosen for faith in reality: the solidness of the ground. Would it hold her? With a deep breath, she walked forward, out of the alley into the rainwashed brightness of the street beyond. -- Mary Kuhner 3/13/91 Article 34910 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!apple!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 31 Message-ID: <1991Mar31.161659.28298@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 31 Mar 91 16:16:59 GMT Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator) Organization: University of California Lines: 285 [This is posted from a different account due to pnews problems. Please send any replies to mkkuhner@gentics.washington.edu, not this address. Also, apologies to anyone who's gotten multiple copies.] 31. Daemon Jayhawk found herself in a sterile metal corridor, to all appearances part of the complex which she'd come to think of as the High Temple. A glance at herself suggested that she was in fact jacked into its computer system: it was her Matrix image, black-haired and dressed in tight-fitting silver. But it didn't quite feel like the Matrix. In particular, although she could access the programs in her headware memory, she couldn't apply them to anything. *Stimsense?* As always, an idea she hated, but difficult to dismiss. She called up her headware map of the complex, and set out to try to place herself. About fifteen minutes later, just as she was coming to the conclusion that the maps were not congruent, she had an odd, eerie sense of something approaching. She retreated to a branching corridor, ready to flee if it was a storm. It was a gnome: about two feet tall, white-haired and red-capped, with round wrinkled cheeks like a dried apple. He walked up to her, looked at her in puzzlement for a moment. She'd seen his like before, carrying messages for Martha on the Matrix. She'd taken them for overly fanciful Matrix constructs. "Who am I?" he said in a slightly raspy voice. "A different question!" she said, laughing. "Um--" He was a system process. She wasn't sure how she knew, but it was apparent. She dredged her thoughts for an appropriate term. "You're a daemon, I think." "Am I? I don't feel like a daemon. I don't think." He sucked in his cheeks. "You're Jayhawk, right?" "Right. Were you looking for me?" "Yes. Why?" "Do you have a message for me? Something to give me?" The others had had scrolls. He shook his head, looking a little worried. "Who sent you? Where did you come from?" "I don't remember." Persistent questioning revealed that he remembered nothing beyond the beginning of his search for her, had no idea who she was beyond the name ("You look like a Jayhawk to me. What's a Jayhawk?") and no idea at all where they were or what was going on. It was a little unsettling. She began to entertain thoughts of humans somehow transformed into system processes, slowly losing their minds to the grinding of the machine. ("Big?" he said indignantly. "I've never been big. Why are you so big?") "Come with me while I map the system," she said after a little while, and they walked along together while she tried to explain 'map', and 'system', and the tangle of other words her explanations led to. He was utterly ignorant, but surprisingly quick to learn; she found she didn't have to repeat herself, though even the most mundane terms caused confusion. "Aha!" he said at last. "I remember why I came. I'm supposed to ask you a question." "Oh boy!" she said sarcastically. "You and everyone else. What is it?" "What do you want?" "Information," she said after a moment's thought. "If you can tell me what kind, I might be able to find it for you." "Computers," she said instantly. "Gates, the Matrix, the Overnet." "Right." Before she could say anything else he was gone, running off so fast he almost seemed to vanish. She tried chasing him, but she could access none of her Matrix-running speed; it was hopeless. It was very quiet in the bare metal halls, and very dull. None of the doors would open. She extended her map far enough to be certain that she was not in the part of the complex she knew, though the overall shape was the same: a hollow square, its center inaccessable. A level above or below hers? She wished the daemon would come back. Inane though its company might be, at least it was conversation. Almost instantly she was aware of something approaching. The gnome came puffing around a corner, stopped short when he saw her. He stared for a moment, then said plaintively, "Who am I?" "A daemon. Possibly the same one I was talking to a couple of minutes ago." "I've never seen you before in my life. Are you sure I'm a daemon? What does that mean?" Jayhawk quoted, rather loosely, from one of her college programming texts. He only looked puzzled. "What do you do?" she said. "Do you have a question to ask me? A message?" He shook his head. A second daemon came running up, a scroll clutched in his hand. The first one stared at him as he handed the scroll to Jayhawk. They were almost identical, slight variations in the tufts of white hair poking out from beneath their hats, the pattern of wrinkles around their eyes. The message was very simple. "'Computers'--insufficiently delimited request." She licked her lips, said slowly and clearly, "What I want is information on making and using Gates. No more than ten K total. And information on reaching and using the Overnet, again no more than ten K total. Summaries of available data. Do you understand?" He parrotted it back to her in her own voice, ran off. The first daemon snorted. "How could you have thought that was me? *He* has a mole on his cheek." She couldn't tell. Carefully, testing possibilities, she thought *A directory daemon*. Almost at once a third gnome appeared. "What do you need *him* for?" said the first, somewhere between curiosity and contempt. "Maps," said Jayhawk to the newcomer. "Um--no more than fifty entries, covering the local structure." The directory daemon produced a scroll and began to scribble. Caught between curiosity and an obvious desire to appear superior, the first daemon peeked over his shoulder. Jayhawk did too, saw that he was making a list. "S2-15. S2-16. S2-18."... "Descriptions!" she said. He dropped the scroll, which vanished as it hit the floor, and producing another carefully began to write, "Tree node 15. Tree node 16."... The first daemon snorted, his low opinion of the second vindicated. "Can you provide graphics?" she asked the directory daemon. "Sure! But...I'd have to spawn to do it." "Go ahead." "I need the key." He looked up at her wistfully. His eyes, all of their eyes, were soft green, with enormous pupils and caterpillar-like white eyebrows. "No." She tightened her grip on her satchel, crept a hand in to touch the cold reassuring metal. 'Hold onto the key,' the speaker in darkness had told her. She suspected it was the key out as well as the key in. "I can't do it then," he said apologetically. Struck by an idea, she thought deliberately, *Spawn this daemon to produce one capable of graphics.* With a look of surprise, the gnome unfolded like a paper doll, producing a perfect duplicate of himself, briefly touching at the fingertips. The first daemon gave his pen to the second, who immediately began to scribble. In a few minutes she had a map of three hundred corridor-linked "tree nodes," whatever those were. She called up a door-opening daemon, asked it to open one of the doors. There was only darkness within. She stuck her head in, wondering if the darkness was merely a curtain, but saw nothing. A waiting dark. "An indexing daemon," the first one remarked helpfully, "could tell you which nodes are in use. If you give me the key I can spawn one." "No!" She spawned it herself, learned that just three of the three hundred were active. Leading a little cavalcade of gnomes, she walked to the nearest, had its door opened. Within was a library--a datastore, Matrix experience prompted--with a frantically scurrying gnome collecting an ever-growing mound of scrolls on a table in the center. She looked at the nearest shelves. The books were labelled only with numbers, but plaintext enough when she took one down--a text on the history of computing. She had had a copy in her office in Seattle. The gnome was apparently working on her information request. A little more walking verified that the other two occupied nodes contained identical scenes. It occurred to her that 'computers, Gates, the Overnet' had been a poor choice of requests. She cancelled that one, noting that the number of nodes in use dropped to two, and paced while waiting for the others to finish. They really were system processes. What did that say about the speed at which things were happening? Either this...computer?...was slower than a hand calculator, or her sense of time was way off. She remembered possessing the node in Aliantha's system. Seconds like hours. Was that it, was she enmeshed in the low-level operations of a computer? She was beginning to accumulate quite a crowd of gnomes. "Color-code yourselves!" she told them, and they obediantly produced different hats. Her first one had a grand many-colored hat. "I'm a supervisory daemon," he told her proudly. "If you want, I can take charge of all these others for you. And if you give me the key--" "No! Don't ask for that." Suddenly their numbers seemed a little alarming. If they rushed her-- "I can send the ones you don't need away for you, if you want." He was reading her mind again. "Sure." The crowd thinned a good deal. Waiting, she amused herself by experimentation. Not all of the daemons she remembered from her CS classes seemed to be available; in particular, inquiries about communicating with other systems or the outside world were met with blank stares. No email, no telecom. The system map showed no exits. But the ones she did have were quite biddable, if a little slow. They seemed smarter than they had initially, or at least more informed. They'd stopped asking who they were or who she was. At last two daemons came puffing up, presented her with scrolls. They were summaries of historical records, starting about--she choked. About forty years ago, with the first experimentation with the Overnet. The first Gate had come about five years later. Still twenty-five years before the Awakening.... They were the records of discoverers, not inventors. Nowhere did it say who had shown them the Overnet, given them the first working Gate; but clearly it had not been developed from first principles. In fact, there was a distressing lack of first principles throughout. Very few of the investigators seemed to have been interested in theory; in recent years, only Martha, whose name appeared over and over. The records cut off sharply ten years ago, at the Awakening. Gates seemed to be simple enough. One needed a computer of sufficient complexity and power at each end, and a sorceror who could use a Gate spell. One sorceror then cast her spell and stepped through, setting various landmarks to make the path, and linked into the spell of the other, who remained where he was. Once the Gate was created, anyone attuned--any priest (which she took to mean sorceror) or many but not all deckers--could simply step through. The Overnet was less clear. They wouldn't define it for her, though there were examples of the way various researchers had perceived it. A forest of melting candy. A city grid. A lush and tangled jungle. Martha had envisioned it as a great Aztec pyramid filled with complex passages. She questioned the gnomes about Martha, got no answers; but it seemed to her that her surroundings might well be Martha's work. The Overnet could be reached in three ways: via a ritual at the High Temple, via a Gate spell, via a working Gate. And it could be left in four, or so they speculated. Via the High Temple again, via a Gate spell, via a working Gate, via a link to the Matrix. A link could be made to any node, anywhere--she put the scroll down, swore aloud. So much for system security, eh? But the notes would not tell her how to make a link to the Matrix, though she requested, and received, amplification at length. "How did I get here?" she asked the daemons: they went skittering off to look for records, came back sadly to report that the system logs had been removed. Any system process, she read, could be duplicated from the Overnet; any SPU induced to behave as CPU of its system; a whole system could be created with no physical machinery at all, and it would generate a normal Matrix representation with which others could interact. The records said nothing about ghosts or gnomes. It began to seem to her that she had outsmarted herself by not waiting for Martha's advice. She snorted aloud. The problem was clear enough: now she was here, how did she get back? She'd figure it out. *They* had, those first Paradisian explorers; and *she* was a scientist. The lack of curiosity in the later sections of the notes left her ill. How could they, how could they have such a resource at their fingertips and not wonder how it worked? The note that said a Gate spell could be used to leave the Overnet also said it had never been tested. *She* would test it, if she got a chance--she thought that, and then crumpled the scroll in her fist, shaken. *No. I may experiment for myself, but for them--nothing.* -- Mary Kuhner 3/28/91 mkkuhner@enzyme.berkeley.edu After 15 January: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu Article 34911 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!apple!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 32 Message-ID: <1991Mar31.161851.28435@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 31 Mar 91 16:18:51 GMT References: <1991Mar31.161659.28298@agate.berkeley.edu> Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator) Organization: University of California Lines: 191 [Please reply to mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu, not this address.] 32. Nodes She couldn't cast a Gate spell, and she didn't have a Gate. If she was in the High Temple, it wasn't helping her; she'd searched the entire complex, and there was quite clearly no way out. So she had to make a link to the Matrix, or she was trapped. "That's pretty straightforward," said Jayhawk aloud to her entourage of gnomes. "How to do it?" The supervisory daemon was sympathetic, if ignorant. The concept of "outside" seeme to give him trouble. "Can you show me what you mean? Maybe that would help." "Show you? How?" "Maybe one of the empty tree-nodes?" Puzzled, but willing to try, Jayhawk had a daemon open a door for her, peered into the darkness. What would be a good node to try to reach? Her own 'room' in the Paradisian system suggested itself. She tried to visualize it, superimposed on the featureless black backdrop, took a cautious step forward. Color and light scrolled out from her movement. A thin slice of the room appeared, unnervingly cut off--she walked further, watched the node take shape around her. She reached the back wall, turned and touched the image of the bed. It felt quite solid, as solid as anything else on the Matrix. "Hm," said the supervisory daemon, a little critically. "Is this 'outside'?" "Kind of. What it looks like." This was a datastore, she realized, not an SPU like the room it was meant to represent. The terminal, which should connect to her jacked-in body, was lifeless. She reached out mentally, tried to sense or create a connection. Nothing responded. "Is that an I/O port?" said the daemon. "What's an I/O port?" And after explanations, "Why don't you make something for it to connect to, and then connect it?" She wrinkled her nose. "I don't think that will accomplish anything, though it might be interesting. Worth a try, I guess." She had another node opened, sketched in an image of her real-space room--the other end to which that terminal should link, after all. There *was* a way to connect them. She could feel it....reached out and tried, met no resistance. Like clicking magnets together--she pushed and the two almost leaped to each other. A little experimentation showed that she had slaved the two terminal images together, so that whatever was entered on one appeared on the other. She snorted. Interesting, but no closer to escape. The daemon typed a few words on each terminal, nodded at her in satisfaction. "There you go." She went back to the Matrix-image room, sketched in a door--the door to the Overnet as she had seen it, massive and decorated. It wouldn't open, wasn't really--as the unhappy daemon she asked to open it quickly explained--wasn't really a door at all, just decoration in a datastore. Nowhere to go. She tried creating an open door, bumped her nose on an invisible wall. Efforts to *make* it connect yielded nothing. As an experiment, she tried linking together the two images of her room--not just for I/O, but a full logical link. A passageway opened in the wall of the chamber she was in; walking down it, she found herself in the other node. So they could be connected: to each other. Not to outside. She didn't seem to get tired here. Was there a time limit, would she die, eventually, if she couldn't return? But if her guess at the speed of events was correct, her body wouldn't even have noticed her absence. Plenty of time. She went back out into the corridor, dissolved the two nodes with a thought. She could always make them again. It was rather enjoyable, actually--filling in form from the darkness. Much easier than graphics code, much closer to the details of her visualization. She tried creating datastores identical to ones remembered from Osiris. She could make them, but they contained nothing, allowed no link to the system they represented. A sudden thought struck her. She was trying to connect with *outside*, as she had told the rather dubious gnome several times. Why was she meddling with datastores and SPUs? To connect a system with its environment one uses a SAN. "Can we make a system access node?" she asked the gnome, whose opinion she was coming to respect. He seemed brighter than he had, distinctly brighter. "Sure!" he said cheerfully, and then, face falling, "Are you going to?" "What's a system access node?" she asked. "It's a...um...a node where you put Guardians." He was obviously uncomfortable. Unlocking a new treenode, she sketched in the main SAN from Osiris, that being the first one that came to mind. Outside the heavy steel gates was only darkness. She tried to extend the image outwards, show the telecom nodes outside. Nothing. Gingerly, she began to step forward, felt the absence of solidity beneath her and drew back hastily. The gnome was huddled in the doorway, watching her unhappily. His subordinates were down the hall, out of sight, muttering among themselves like unruly peasants. "Are you done? That's a SAN. Outside is a bad place, you don't want to go out there." She certainly was not eager to lose herself in that darkness. "Let's see one of these guardian daemons. *Spawn*." She touched the key, willed one to come. Looking even more unhappy, the supervisory daemon unfolded like a paper cutout. His new image resembled a gnome, but only on the surface. Beneath the face it wore like a mask was something else, something she couldn't quite make out. It stared at her in silence. "Watch the system," she told it, "and report to me if anyone but myself accesses it." Now that she'd seen it, she found that she didn't particularly want it close to her; but sending it away seemed like an admission of weakness. It contracted to a point, faded away. "Brr," said the supervisory daemon. "Those things give me the creeps." "Why can't I connect to anything outside?" "Why would you want to?" He recoiled from her expression. "I don't know. I've never been outside. You could go through the records again." She went through the records again. Four ways to escape the Overnet. Through the Temple, through a Gate, onto the Matrix. Via a Gate spell, if untested conjectures were to be believed. But they wouldn't tell her how to get to the Matrix. Perhaps it was like a Gate? 'A computer of sufficient complexity and power to anchor it.' She remembered the first Gate she'd seen, back at Wired Lightning--a window in the ceiling, showing the gold of a sunrise half the world away, not the black of Seattle night. They'd destroyed the computer, sealed the Gate off, though Chalker's ghost still guarded its shadow. She'd been the one to tell the others that the computer was critical, the Gate's support and source. Intuition. No one had believed her, until Duende confirmed it months later. She went back to the empty tree-nodes, set about constructing a mock-up of her own system, Osiris. It was easy enough--she knew it intimately, the circle of four nodes around the old-fashioned CPU. Finished, she stood in the SAN, looked dubiously out into the darkness. Duende had told her Osiris didn't have the power to support a Gate. Apparently he was right; at least, her probes into the darkness awoke no more response than before. Bigger, then. She tacked on nodes from other systems she'd run, a piece of Cavilard Base here, a section of Wired Lightning there, whole complexes borrowed from the University's net. Still nothing. It was dead, that was why. Just images of nodes--real images, as real as anything on the Matrix, but not functioning. The datastores to which her information retrieval daemons had access were active and functional. "Why?" she asked the supervisory daemon. "What are they linked to?" "You." "Me?" She stopped short, thought about that for a moment. Was the information her own, buried perhaps in the code Lefty had hidden in her mind? Or accessable to this system through her, via the radio in her head perhaps? Whatever the case, those nodes were alive. She linked one of the active datastores, gnome and all, to her makeshift megasystem. All around her, things flickered into motion; she could *feel* the CPU strain, trying to coordinate the disparate parts. It was hideous; painful to be near, almost physically painful. It was the ugliest computer she had ever seen. Dismayed, she considered fixing it. No! don't be silly, Jayhawk. She retreated to the corridors and unmade the entire thing with a thought. It was a relief not to see it any longer, not to feel it. Slowly, she grinned. This approach would work. But not with such a makeshift mess. If she needed a huge computer, she would build one from scratch. -- Mary Kuhner 3/30/91 mkkuhner@enzyme.berkeley.edu After 15 January: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu Article 34912 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!apple!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 33 Message-ID: <1991Mar31.162053.28583@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 31 Mar 91 16:20:53 GMT References: <1991Mar31.161659.28298@agate.berkeley.edu> Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator) Organization: University of California Lines: 173 [Please reply to mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu, not this address.] 33. System Jayhawk had studied system design in college, dreamed of creating mainframes; but that kind of authority just isn't put in the hands of undergraduates, and she'd never finished her advanced degree. She'd had ideas, a decker's dream system.... Begin with the CPU. Huge, a spider's egg of black glass and solid light, massive and yet delicate; lights to show the system's heartbeat for those with eyes to read it, fragile lattices of fiberoptics and silver that the user could walk, surveying her domain. A single user. Why not? There was no one else. Low gravity, so that the dizzying falls between tiers, the gossamer stairways between its half-enclosed chambers, were effortless as flight. Outwards in three directions, three complex spirals of nodes, the main body of the system. Black glass and silver, cables of braided light, mirrors and windows true and false. She made it deceptive, treacherous to anyone but herself--some of the views shown were illusory, glimpses from one node into another that did not show what was really there, apparent accesses that led nowhere. One spiral of nodes for the public, if anyone but herself were ever to use this--terminal support, telecom, device drivers. That branch was solid, a little mechanical, echoes of the submarine-like design of Osiris. Silvered steel and panels of black or clear glass on which information could be displayed. Datastores filled with hundreds upon thousands of overlapping clear plates, light shining through them to illuminate the nodes beyond. It ended in a latticelike bridge, a SAN, out into the darkness. One spiral for research, for the dimly-guessed-at projects it would take to put the Paradisian discoveries to work. Nodes of harsh simplicity, stringently isolated from the forces she might unleash. The innermost two had ringing balconies, ribbon-like ladders stretching down to a test floor of solid steel. The SAN was a heavy bridge, tower-guarded. Data- stores in abundance--she stopped, laughed at herself. No wonder they'd never let her design systems. This would take a top-flight military machine to run, this single-user monster of hers--she wasn't sure even that would be enough. But why not? Power delighted her, why not indulge herself? She needed a machine of great complexity, the records said so. Why not make it beautiful as well? The third spiral of nodes was for her. A trophy room, storage for IC she might create, things she might steal--empty now, gleaming with possibility. Workrooms modelled loosely after Martha's--what was she going to do with four separate workrooms? Never mind, it fit the symmetry, and she'd think of something. A datastore like sculptures of crystal welling with light. And in the center of it, her own node. Softer than the others, velvet as well as glass. No real floor, only a scatter of levels linked by filigree. A ledge high up for her to lie on--she'd decided that the room-like aspect of her node in the Paradisian system had its advantages. Panels of black glass to act as windows into the machine's operations, the datastores below. An I/O link that should lead to her body, if she ever found it again. Between the three arms she created watchtowers: nodes high above the others, connecting the arms to one another via intertwined spiralling staircases. She wanted each watchtower to be able to see two-thirds of the system, its windows showing an apparent overview that reflected the reality of what was happening below; a difficult trick, but eventually managed, or at least an illusion convincing even to her. She concealed the accesses to the watchtower nodes as the Hidden Fortress had been concealed, warping the structure of the node to pull it out of the normal modes of vision. That was hard too, but these were security nodes: what better security than having them invisible, inaccessable? She linked them back to the CPU, hid those accesses too. There should be IC in the watchtowers, but that was for later. It was the machine she needed now. She lost herself in the work. It was endlessly fascinating, the process of creation; though she could imagine each part, the whole was beyond her grasp, so that she was continually discovering new interrelations, new vistas. Not all of them pleased her, and she spent as much time refining as creating, trying to match a vision itself constantly changing as she saw more and more of what was possible. Engrossed in it, she didn't have to think about Paradisio, about imprisonment, about fear or loneliness or guilt. Beneath the CPU she set two simple chambers, one to hold an isolation field if she could ever contrive one, the other--a Gate, should this system ever support a Gate. Looking at the second, a hexagonal whorl of black glass patterned with the silver of monitors and wards, it occurred to her just how Paradisian the entire complex was, how much of it was modelled after the systems of theirs she had run. Was she making it for them? was this to be the new Seattle base? She laughed aloud. Let them try it. If they could break her to their will, of course they would have anything she could make at their disposal; but if not, she imagined they'd be endlessly frustrated by what she had made. It was perfectly suited to her, but seeded with a thousand awkward- nesses and annoyances for anyone else. She knew the techniques well. Osiris had incorporated a few of them, after she'd gotten done customizing the operating system; her ace in the hole against the inevitable student who wanted to challenge the sysop's domination. Let them try. She was very careful in the CPU, ready to spook if it showed any signs of life; but nothing happened until she fitted in the very last datastore, completed the plan she had invisioned. A shudder went through the entire system, a vast shifting. For just an instant she felt the machine as a whole, alive around her--within her--she was alone in the great darkness, the crystalline pattern of it held within her mind, turning there. The corridors which still linked the nodes, no part of her grand design, vanished. Frozen patterns of light awoke all around her, a play of white and amber and soft blue. Sourceless and familiar, a voice spoke: "Jayhawk-1 is on line." Her own voice, or almost so. The shifting ended, the system settled into a barely-active waiting state. The corridors reappeared. Somehow she knew that she could break those connections at will, but if she did so she would lose the corridor system permanently; there'd be no going back, alone in the dark of the Overnet. She considered it, decided to wait. Marvelling, she walked through the system, saw it for the first time as it had been conceived--not static, but moving, living, flooded with the everchanging patterns of the dataflow. It was the best thing she had ever made, the most beautiful system she had ever seen. Almost frighteningly lovely. "It's very pretty," said the supervisory daemon. "But I still think you should have had more red lights. I like red." She turned on him in a fury, then reconsidered and seized upon another of the gnomes, a hapless information-retriever. With a thought, she reshaped him, heavy flesh that had no place here becoming silver and light, almost insubstantial, a sprite with hidden dragonfly wings that could become a shimmer of light, one with the other lights in their continual dance. Called him back again to gnome-form, to see if she could. "Whoah!" he said, ruddy complexion paling. "What did you do?" "You don't like it?" said Jayhawk dangerously, hand on a glittering panel. They were in a watchtower node, two-thirds of the system spread out beneath them. "It's, uh, very pretty, but we like the way we are better," said the supervisory daemon. The others muttered approval. She looked at them, a little crowd of gnomes in luridly colored hats, tufts of white on their chins--looked at the glory of black and silver and blue around her, and winced. In one deliberate, sustained effort of will she changed them all, not only their forms but their desires as well. *This is what you are, what you wish to be; nothing else.* They scattered into the system like an explosion of falling stars, richer concentrations in the pulses of lights that mapped out its connections, waiting--she could feel it--for her command. Only the supervisory daemon, now a winged sprite of silver with ice-blue eyes, remained manifest. "Is that better?" she said to him, chin held high. "It is," he said in a voice like silver bells. "What will you do now?" She slid down the railing of the spiral stairs, walked to the SAN node of her personal complex. The lacy silver bridge went out into nothingness, not black now but a dull, sight-defying grey. Something was out there, beyond the limits of her vision--she could feel it. She reached out, tried to make the connection. Closer. Infinitely closer than before; but not enough. Something was lacking, in her or in her system. She was still trapped. -- Mary Kuhner 3/31/91 mkkuhner@enzyme.berkeley.edu After 15 January: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu Article 35412 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rphroy!caen!uwm.edu!bionet!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 34 Message-ID: <1991Apr7.102630.2860@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 7 Apr 91 10:26:30 GMT Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator) Organization: /etc/organization Lines: 200 [Posted from another account due to pnews problems; please reply to mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu. Thanks.] 34. Experiment Jayhawk did not dare enter the CPU. She was almost sure that the programming which Lefty had inflicted on her was still in her mind, waiting to destroy her and her system. As if in confirmation, whenever she even approached the machine's center she would sense a rise in system activity, a pulse of messages from her location to the CPU, like the whine of an increasingly stressed motor. She explored the rest of the system, found no flaw in it. Whatever was lacking, it certainly was not power or complexity. Activity? She spawned a collection of daemons to increase the load, test the machine's capacities. A hundred processes, a thousand, ten thousand. The light-play quickened, the race of the system's heartbeat flickering across her own nerves. It was *immensely* powerful, her creation. She walked back to the SAN node, tried once again to bridge the darkness. Better, but not sufficient; and she could sense that she'd overload even this colossal machine before it was enough. No. She was still missing something. Computing power she had in plenty. The Paradisian bases had always been well-supplied with raw energy as well. A fusion plant, Duende had told her, was standard to hold a Gate. Was that what she needed? Electricity? What would that mean, here? She remembered, vague wisps obscured by the Paradisian's mind-meddling, how Osiris had nearly been destroyed--arcs of power around the CPU like bars of a cage, the outer nodes contracting, distorting as their resources were dragged into the greedy maw, more power pouring in from outside. She had not only severely damaged Osiris' motherboard, but blown out every power transformer in the entire University grid with her demands. Very cautiously, she tried to call up such energies, standing on the balcony of a test-site room staring at the floor below. Nothing happened. There was no source for her to tap into; whatever was powering the machine, she had no direct access to it. She questioned the daemons, but they could tell her nothing. Eventually she made her way back to her personal node, sat on the hidden bed-shelf and thought hard. What could be lacking? Knowledge? She went through the files once more, found nothing. The cutoff ten years ago was becoming intensely frustrating. Surely they had learned more since then; why give her some information, but deny the most recent and useful? Did she need magic? If so, she was well and truly trapped. A spiteful folly on the Paradisian's part, sending her here, if it took magic to escape. Surely they'd had easier ways to destroy her. Or was there magic hidden in Lefty's programming? The destruction of Osiris...had seemed impossible. Modifying hardware from software, bending the entire University grid to her task, power across lines never meant for it, across fuses that did not blow until Duende disrupted her concentration.... Was that the trap? No escape unless she knowingly submitted herself to Lefty and Aliantha's design, let her system be destroyed or transformed, and whatever was to happen to her....No! There had to be another way. Even if Paradisio had never found one, *she* would. The system was far too precious to destroy. She winced at herself. She'd created it as a tool, to test her ideas about what might be needed to escape the Overnet, perhaps to be sacrificed so that she could succeed. She had no business becoming attached to it. What did she lack? Not complexity, not computing power. There were no special procedures mentioned in the historical files--no procedures at all, beyond 'make a connection to the Matrix, and then....' Control? Very cautiously, she reached out to the machine around her. Understanding, first--that would bring control. It was like breaking a seal into a vacuum. Her awareness rushed out, expanded into the emptiness of the system before she could hope to restrain or control it. She saw the entire complex, spread out around/within her, the myriad interactions and connections that gave it power. Everything at once, to a level of detail that made her gasp--she could understand it, it was not...quite...too much, but dizzying....Ah, and lovely. So *this* was what it was really like, her machine. Even more lovely than she had known. She tried to run a check, found that she had perception but no direct control. The distraction of failure ended the vision, jarred her from the strange doubling of perception that let her sense her body, her position in the node, and at the same time the position and status of every process, every node in the complex. She reached for it at once, frustrated with the limitations of her single viewpoint. The--overwatch? she thought, comparing it to the system's towers looking down on the rest of it--the overwatch was remarkably pleasant. The system cradled her...no, that sounded too cozy for this splendor of light and dark, steel and glass. But it was a very secure feeling. She walked down to the SAN once more, tried to gather together the resources of the system in her visualization, make the link. Nothing happened. For a little while, she experimented with trying to create a daemon which could do what she wanted. After a dozen or so tries, intuition presented her with a startling conclusion: the only daemon which could do what she wanted would be one spawned off of *her*. A double, a daughter-process of her own. She didn't try it. The idea seemed both frightening and rather perverse. She made her way back to her node, watching the light-play of the system. It seemed subtly different; she slipped into overwatch to see it as a whole, could find no changes for some time. At last, staring up at the ceiling of her node, she realized that the last tiny flaws, mismatches with her conception too trivial to fix, were gone; as if in seeing it as a whole she had made it fully concordant with what her imagination had forseen. (Or had her conception changed, confronted with the reality, leaving not even a memory of what she'd thought she wanted? She wasn't quite sure.) She needed control, not just vision. With a deep breath, fearing both success and failure, she reached for it. *This is the center*, she thought carefully. *The CPU is a tool; the nodes and SANs are tools; but always the center is where I am. By definition. And from the center I command.* It was like standing chest-deep in rough water, buffetted by waves--able to turn them a little aside, ripple the waters, but nearly overwhelmed by the force of the tide. She was aware of the CPU, wavemaker, power there to override anything she chose to do--but not opposing her, and she *could* control the system, command by laborous command. She reached out to a daemon busy in one of the datastores, set it on a different task; started processes running so that she could play with them, diverted them from their set paths by an effort like shifting a great mass. She swore aloud, thinking suddenly of a decker trying to run a system like this one, facing an opponent with perfect knowledge and near-perfect control. It seemed hopeless. She puzzled over that, toying with one process and another to test her control, her vision. The CPU, that was a vulnerability. So her approach to the Hidden Fortress had been right after all. Straight into the CPU, stopping for nothing--there was no other way to win. Was that what running the High Temple's system would have been like? was the speaker in darkness able to direct that machine--huger than hers, huger than she could ever imagine using--like this, directly, by will and vision? She snorted. Her plans to escape that way had been even more futile than she'd appreciated. She remembered Martha demonstrating teleportation, opening a doorway from one node to another. 'Not now,' Martha had answered her request to be taught that trick. 'I can't. Maybe afterwards.' *Teleport*. Her consciousness shattered in the instant of the decision, scattered across the entire system--no thought, no will, but a brief dizzying moment of awareness without self-awareness, one stream of data among the myriads. She found herself standing in the SAN of the public-access region, trembling. It was rather like the code she and Kurt had written to merge her consciousness with the machine's; rather like the time she'd failed to master it, come out of her trance with memories of processes, but no memory at all of Jayhawk during the intervening time. Only an instant, by the system clock--she had no other way to judge. The fear faded after a moment, left her exultant. She could do it! CPU teleport without recourse to the CPU, anywhere to anywhere. And a moment in overwatch confirmed that her experiment had done the system no harm. *Again.* She tried to stay in overwatch through the jump, failed miserably. It seemed possible, but the concentration needed.... All of this could use considerable practice. She set herself to it, inventing tasks to be done by remote-control, wrestling with the CPU's own processes, trying to learn the system inside and out. Teleported until she was dizzy with it, occasionally managed to keep her equilibrium well enough to maintain overwatch and control, more often not. Jumped at last to the SAN, reached out for control--not the entire system, she couldn't manage that, but a slow gathering of power and capacity into her grasp. Reached out to make the link with a good deal of confidence in her ability. Nothing. She stood on the lacy bridge, staring out into the greyness, and swore. Not enough, not quite enough. It was becoming more and more difficult to deny that what she needed was control of the CPU, the ability to dedicate the entire machine to her will and desire. Lefty's code stood across that path like bars closing the gate to freedom. She did not quite believe, after her previous experiences, that her unaided will could fight his programming and win. And she knew that self-doubt would make her defeat certain. -- (c) 1991 Mary K. Kuhner -- mkkuhner@enzyme.berkeley.edu After 15 January: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu Article 35568 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!batcomputer!caen!sdd.hp.com!spool.mu.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!stanford.edu!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 35 Message-ID: <1991Apr9.203057.6611@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 9 Apr 91 20:30:57 GMT Article-I.D.: agate.1991Apr9.203057.6611 Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator) Organization: /etc/organization Lines: 266 [Posted from another account due to pnews problems; please reply to mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu.] 35. Dragon Though the system clock metered the passage of time, it was hard for Jayhawk to take it seriously. She didn't tire. Her body might be languishing in captivity, but her captors seemed well-equipped to take care of it; and in any case, until she could find a way off the Overnet there wasn't much she could do. It seemed an adequate excuse to spend hours--days, she realized on a second look at the clock--refining her control over the machine, looking for weaknesses in her defenses. She tried to work out tactics for a decker running the system--after all, she might have to deal with such a situation someday, and in the meantime it was instructive. A few kinds of system processes blurred overwatch very subtly, but it didn't seem possible for a decker to hide in them. The CPU was the only place she had difficulty watching, the only possibility of concealment. At last she had to admit that she was stalling, enjoying herself but making no progress. She teleported back to her node, sat thinking once more. The crux of the problem was control of the CPU, direct control. She had to have it, she was becoming quite certain, to escape the Overnet; but she dared not take it, because of Lefty. Cursing Lefty didn't even make her feel better. She could gamble on her ability to resist his programming, but she was not optimistic. Still, the idea kept creeping back into her thoughts. She was intensely curious about what would happen. After the destruction of Osiris, she recalled, she had even toyed with the idea of stealing a machine of similar capabilities, using it as test-bed to find out what that code would *do*. Not a good idea, then or now; but a difficult one to put aside. She put it aside once more, forcibly, and considered the possibility of duplicating herself, trying to evade the programming that way. Thought experiments, and a few abortive references to the key, quickly showed her that she could not create a double under her control and dominion. For one distressing moment she did make *something*--felt the fire of its hatred along her nerves like acid, tried to unmake it. It fought back, reaching out through the system, calling to the guardian daemons--vanished as she managed to reassert control. She felt almost physically ill, afterwards. Not under her command, not subserviant to her. How could she create such a creature? What would she do with it afterwards? Destroy it? It seemed to her that that was the train of thought which had made the hateful thing. A double of hers would want to live, as she did. Leave it loose in the system? But the system was *hers*. After considerable thought: The other daemons could reabsorb their spawn when the task was done, though she often terminated the processes before they could do so. Create this double for the one task, reabsorb her--no, intuition warned once again. She herself would hardly consent to be 'absorbed.' Very carefully, chosing each detail, she thought *She shall have half my power, half my control; and when we are done we will rejoin, because otherwise both of us will be less than we could be.* At that point another problem presented itself. The power of the key, though it could be shared with her daemons--she had found that she could grant them the power to spawn or command on their own, though it diluted her control a little, weakened her--could not be so neatly divided in two. The key itself was one, and could have only one holder. And it would be needed for what must be done in the CPU. *All right.* It was an enormous gamble...but the only alternative she could find was to trust herself to Lefty's handiwork, and that was a much worse one. She tried to impose just two strictures on the process she would create. *Do not harm the system, or yourself, or me. Be free from Lefty's coercion.* The key was in her hand, held out like an offering. Her vision blurred, doubling for a moment. A wave of exhaustion swept over her, unexpected and almost painful. She blinked, tried to focus. She was looking into wide silver eyes, only a meter away--startling, she seldom saw the eyes of her own Matrix image. The other Jayhawk was holding the key in her hand; her own hands were empty. "It didn't work--" said the other in puzzlement; then her eyes widened further, and she hefted the key in her hand. "*Oh!*" Surprise, but not dismay. "Good luck," said Jayhawk weakly. "Please be careful." The other grinned at her in sudden wild delight. "Hey! This means it's okay if I--" and vanished. Jayhawk climbed up to her shelf, sat huddled with her arms around her knees. She was so tired it hurt to breathe. Overwatch was easy, and a partial escape from the exhaustion; she settled into it, watched the other Jayhawk. She had teleported to one of the nodes adjacent to the CPU, ran lightly up the cobweb strand that linked it to the center. Crossed the threshhold-- The entire system shivered. Distantly, so distantly, Jayhawk caught the echo of what her double was feeling--cried out aloud, pounded her fists on the wall of the node in frustration and bitter jealousy. It was like the first motorcycle ride with Martha, kept from true contact with the machine by the forbiddance in her mind...worse, far worse, because more fiercely desired, more clearly perceived. Dimly through her emotional turmoil she sensed the other breaking the links that still held them to the corridor network, reaching out into the greyness. It was almost as if she did it herself, working through a strangely attenuated link with a remote. Almost. The difference was torment. She fought to keep herself from trying to reassert control, unsure whether success or failure would be worse. A burst of protocol as their system touched another, linked. From overwatch she could see it, with concentration--a pyramid, standing on a little piece of earth unanchored in the greyness. From this vantage, somewhere above it, she could see that there was indeed a building on the top, a small square structure of pillars and arches, an open courtyard at its heart. The High Temple proper? The other Jayhawk appeared abruptly in her node, cheeks flushed with excitement. "Works!" she said. "Figure we didn't need the other nodes; this is plenty big enough." She was *different*. Jayhawk stared at her, trying to understand what her intuition was telling her, saw only her own Matrix image. "You've changed," she whispered. "Attuned to the machine," said the other. "It's almost like being a part of it. That was what we needed, what we couldn't get from out here." She wanted to deny what she was seeing. It had been such a good plan, so clean, so clever....But it was impossible. She could see too clearly what the merger would do to her--half attuned to the machine, half free; neither in control, neither able to integrate the other's perceptions and abilities. (Why not? I made the Kurt code work, surely this is no worse....She remembered the thoughts of the SPU, shivered. That had *been* insanity, Channa was right. A useful insanity. But enduring it forever....) "We can't rejoin, not while we're so different. We'll go mad." She held her breath, waiting for the contemptuous response--Why would I want to? I don't need you. "Damn!" said the other with passion. "That's no good. Are you sure?" She bit her lip in a familiar gesture. "Of course you're sure. I can see what you mean, too. Do you have any idea what we can do about it?" She leaned against the wall of the node. "It's hard for me to remember. It's like the memories are still yours, and I can just barely access them--like you're a datastore, but a really distant one. I don't like it. Incomplete, like I--we--thought." "Attune me to the machine." "Can't," said the other unhappily. "It's *done*. I'd have to unmake it and start again"--both of them winced--"and I didn't leave myself anything to work with, breaking connection with the old complex like that.--Had to, we weren't going anywhere until I did." She looked at Jayhawk in dismay. "I'm sorry." Can I bring her back into synch with me, do I have the power? She had no power over the other at all, she discovered at once. Slowly, she said, "Can you change me--block out the Lefty code, or bring me into synch with you?" The other's eyes closed for a second. "No. Key or no key, you're out of my reach. Hm. Maybe. If we were both in the CPU--" "Can you keep out the Lefty code, now that you're in control?" "Maybe. I'm not sure." "Try it." She was utterly desperate. She could *feel* the vacancy within her, the power she had given up to create the double. Not just power. Part of herself--of her soul, if she believed in souls. The other Jayhawk nodded sharply, held out her hand. They walked together toward the center of the system. As before, a whine of increasing sytem activity accompanied them, rising to a near-shriek as they climbed the cobweb leading to the CPU. The double stepped ahead, turned to watch as Jayhawk crossed the threshhold-- Power lanced through her like a knife, the system's power and more. As if it were happening to her own body, she could feel the barriers at the SANs shattering, the greyness pouring in. Light flared, blinding her eyes but not the terrible clarity that saw what was happening, to the system, to her.... She couldn't control it. She had given that ability to the other Jayhawk, saved none for herself. She screamed aloud, defiance at the onrushing grey, the overwhelming waves of foreignness invading system and mind and soul. Fought back, hopelessly, felt something tear inside her--a brief contact, fleeting sense that she still had a body, somewhere--a body that the torrents, balked, crashed into with tidal force. Tore her from the system, sent her spinning away. She found herself on the Matrix, in the open courtyard at the top of the Pyramid. The buildings around her were inscribed with spells, programs, formulae which tugged at her mind, offering understanding. She looked around in puzzlement. Faint and far off, she could feel the other Jayhawk, but the direction her intuition indicated was impossible. The buildings glittered, bricks bright as scales, as feathers--she caught her breath. Scales, feathers, something huge coiled around her--no buildings at all, the whole system was one great creature. She turned slowly, taking it in. Awakened, alive, unspeakably complex. She traced the serpentine coils out until she found the head. His eyes met hers, and for an instant a trace of his emotions brushed her mind. Loneliness like the sea, like the night sky, vast beyond imagining. She tried to look away, could not even begin to do so. He relented a little, still holding her gaze, let her breathe again. His eyes were the color of the sun, dying. "Jayhawk," he said in a voice that was many voices, trembling in the structure around her. "So you have come back. It is a pity." "Why?" she said softly. "You are dying, Jayhawk." On the word 'dying' the other voices were raised, a chorus of dismay. "Your body is broken. I can help you, if you wish." "What would the price be?" Her own voice surprised her. So calm. "I need you for just a little while longer. And then there will be an end. Perhaps a new beginning." "Why? Why are you doing this?" Among the many voices was one she knew. "To ease the pain. Perhaps to end it." She struggled to look away, could not. His pain gnawed at the back of her mind. "What did Aliantha say to you, when she stood here?" Gravely, he said, "She told me she loved me. It wasn't true; but she believed it when she said it." With equal gravity, listening to her own words as if they were another's: "I will die before I serve you." And, the words torn from her: "I would kill you if I could." It was not hatred but mercy, the only mercy she could imagine or offer. "I am sorry," he said. "There could have been so much...." The great eyes closed at last, freeing her; and as if they had been holding earth and sky together, the pavement under her feet dissolved, plummeting her into the abyss. For an instant she thought she heard someone calling her name, a familiar voice. And the Dragon: "Goodbye, Jayhawk." Dissolution, cutting off pain and regret and defiance alike. Nothingness. -- (c) 1991 Mary K. Kuhner -- mkkuhner@enzyme.berkeley.edu After 15 January: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu Article 35599 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!linac!att!ucbvax!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 36 Message-ID: <1991Apr10.031341.11777@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 10 Apr 91 03:13:41 GMT Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator) Organization: /etc/organization Lines: 94 [This is posted from another account due to pnews problems. Please reply to mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu.] 36. Caroline The system was disintegrating, its integrity destroyed by the gaping holes at the SANs, the greyness pouring unchecked through them. In the CPU, Jayhawk struggled desperately to hold things together, contain the damage to the outer regions. In the back of her mind she was aware of the other Jayhawk's decision; of death like a darker greyness opening, a door to nowhere. It tugged at her, too, trying to pull her from her system. No! She abandoned her attempt to maintain the outer nodes, clinging with all her strength to the fading sense of contact. Death sucked at her, trying to draw her down, dissolve her as it was dissolving the other.... Faintly, she heard the echo of the Dragon's voice: "Good luck, Jayhawk." Speaking to her, to the other, she wasn't sure. And she held. It seemed suddenly impossible that she should not. She was in her system, part of it; no outside force had power to pry her loose. She was a mountain, not to be shifted by tugging at a single stone; a vast weight, no lever long enough to move her. She laughed aloud in delight, stretched out her arms and felt weight in them-- Oh-my-god-we're-in-the-CPU--*Teleport!* "Ahh," said the voice, insight and a vast amusement. His laughter echoed in her mind, sharp with the echo of pain behind the humor, as she sat on the shelf in her node, holding the other Jayhawk, the system holding them both. ** She found herself lying in darkness, cradled in the circle of someone's arms. "Where am I?" she whispered. "Our node," said a familiar voice just behind her ear. In a wondering voice, the other went on, "You said 'no'!" "I did." My God, I'm alive! "Wouldn't you have?" A sudden thought struck her, and she struggled against the other's hold. "You didn't agree to serve him, did you? To save me?" Amused: "Who am I to second-guess a decision like that? No. You were dying, all right--tried to pull me along with you. But it's not so easy to budge me from here, and I guess I held on to you." Jayhawk relaxed, settled back into the other's arms. It was like being embraced by the system; like overwatch. Secure. "Why is it so dark? Is everything okay?" "There was a horrendous flash. I'm not seeing too well either, but I imagine it'll come back." A brief pause. "Damage control reports everything's fine. Contact with the other system was broken off, there was a little trouble containing that, but otherwise we're in good shape. Pretty amazing, considering." The arms enfolding her tightened. "If you die, all of this dies. That won't do at all, Jay. Argh. I think we should call you Caroline--this is just too confusing." "Hey! I'm the original!" "And you were called Caroline before you were called Jayhawk, weren't you? Do you have a better idea?" At her snort: "Can you check overwatch? I'm getting no reports of damage, but...." "You can't?" "Nope. Brief glimpses into nodes, one at a time, but nothing sustained. I think we really did partition the power evenly. More or less." Caroline closed her still-useless eyes, reached for overwatch. It was breathtakingly easy, vision flooding in to fill the darkness. The system spun about her like a wheel of light, perfect in every detail. She could see herself, and the other--Jayhawk, ha! *She* was Jayhawk. But for convenience' sake it would do. The other was almost a system process, on an analytical inspection. Almost herself. Not quite either. "It looks fine." Passionately: "Good." And then, in a much more relaxed voice, "We lost contact with Paradisio back there. It may take us quite a while to find them again, or anything else--unless you can do something I can't. It's a big place, apparently, the Overnet." Overwatch showed nothing beyond the system's boundaries but unrelenting greyness. -- Copyright Mary K. Kuhner 1991 -- mkkuhner@enzyme.berkeley.edu After 15 January: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu Article 35902 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!uwm.edu!linac!att!ucbvax!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 37 Message-ID: <1991Apr12.221552.7281@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 12 Apr 91 22:15:52 GMT Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator) Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 104 [Posted from another account due to pnews problems. Please reply to mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu.] 37. Lost "Jayhawk?" Caroline winced at what she'd just said, went on anyway: "I felt something, on the Pyramid....I think I might be dead, my body I mean. I caught the lashback of the--of what I did. Boom, like Lefty said." She didn't feel dead. Better than she had, in fact; freed of the clinging exhaustion which making the daughter process had cost her. But the idea wouldn't go away. "If they can get you back from that once," said Jayhawk, "they can do it again, I bet. They've probably got the pattern on tape or something. Sure you'd *want* to go back? Into captivity?" "I don't know. Can I survive like this, or will I turn into a ghost and blow away?" She felt the other shrug, behind her. "Point's pretty moot until we find them again, or find *something*. Are you feeling all right?" "Pretty good for a dead person." Caroline laughed, a little shakily. "I can see now, though it's still fuzzy around the edges." She slid off the edge of the shelf, fell lightly to the floor. She'd set the gravity in this node by feel, but it couldn't be more than half normal. A flicker of overwatch, almost involuntary.--0.4 G's. The CPU no longer responded to her approach with a flurry of messages, escalating whine of near-overload--in fact, it didn't seem to respond at all. She balanced on the spiderweb strand that led to it, regarded the great spun-glass egg speculatively. "Do you suppose it's gone--the Lefty code, I mean? Run its course?" "I don't want to gamble on that," said Jayhawk instantly, and then, more slowly, "But you're not going to rest until you find out, are you? I know I wouldn't. Might as well, then." She ran lightly up the web-strand, stood at the edge of the CPU with her hand outstretched. It seemed to Caroline that there was an edge to her voice--fear, perhaps hostility. She understood why, knew that Jayhawk couldn't help seeing her as a dangerous intruder. But the understanding only added fuel to the fires of her own jealousy. Slowly, watching for untoward reactions from the system, she walked up the cobwebby bridge. Nothing happened. Holding her breath, she stepped across the invisible dividing line between the nodes. In an instant the whole system shifted, offering itself to her control. Messages flared across her vision: "Intruder Alert. SAN 1. SAN 2. SAN 3." She could feel the greyness, pressing in from outside--could feel the whole system, *hers*, as it should be--and something else, a wild surge of power, mastery of the system and *more*-- She threw herself back along the strand, nearly falling from it--an instant's wild thought: I didn't make anywhere for that fall to go, I wonder what would happen? It *hurt* to give up control, it had felt so right for that brief instant, so utterly natural....Hardly knowing how she got there, she found herself in the access node just outside the SAN, solid flooring underfoot. Her whole body was trembling with reaction. Above her on the webwork, Jayhawk swore softly. Caroline looked up, found her dangling spider-like from the strand, one leg hooked around it. "No, I take it?" Jayhawk said rather coldly. "No. I'm sorry." Relenting a little: "Well, we needed to find that out. I'm sorry too--I know how you must feel." She frowned, closed her eyes. "We had intrusions at all three SANs, apparently. Know what that was?" "The grey outside, I think, or something beyond it." Jayhawk nodded slowly. "All right. So we have some problems...we've solved worse. Why don't we both think about it for a while, see what we come up with?" She climbed back up onto the strand, turned to go back into the CPU. Caroline gathered her concentration, tried to teleport back to her node. Nothing happened. "Jayhawk--" Hating the name, cruel reminder of what she was denied. "I can't teleport. Can you give me permissions?" "Not very safely," said Jayhawk, biting her lip. "It's a CPU operation, you know." She hesitated a moment, added softly, "There's a fraction of a second gapped out of my memories; I wouldn't even know it was there except for the system clock. While you were in control.--It's as if I didn't exist. I may have the key, Caroline, but....We need to be careful." Caroline nodded assent, unhappily, and turned to walk back to her node. Like a surging wave, something picked her up, flung her with abandon into the half-consciousness of system movement; left her dizzy and surprised at her destination. Teleport; but not hers. She climbed back up to the shelf, lay on her side staring at the wall. System processes flickered beneath its surface, flashing from node to node at the other Jayhawk's command. She could see them...in overwatch, she could see with utter clarity. But they no longer answered her at all. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 35973 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!wuarchive!uwm.edu!bionet!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 38 Message-ID: <1991Apr13.162116.14140@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 13 Apr 91 16:21:16 GMT Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator) Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 191 [Posted from another account due to pnews problems; please reply to mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu.] 38. Search Jayhawk lay along a diagonal strand of the CPU's internal webbing, watching the play of light through the heart of her machine. Her thoughts were clearest here, at the center; but the wealth of power at her disposal also made painfully clear what she was lacking. Memories, mainly. Breaking the links with the corridor-web had cost her all the files she hadn't copied into her own storage, all the Paradisian history --and it might have been valuable, ten years out of date though it was. But the distancing of her own memories was far more painful. The information was there, or at least some of it was--her training, her experience as a decker, the vendetta against Montaigne Paradisio, her capture and what came of it. But it was far off, mountains seen through clouds. Distant as the sense of her own flesh when she'd been linked to the motorcycle but denied full connection. She *needed* Caroline. Methodically, she considered the resources of the system, looked for ways to address that problem. She couldn't force merger on Caroline, wasn't sure that she would if she could. She had only a vague sense of the disharmony her double had described, the madness that waited for them if they tried to become one again; but she believed her. She'd seen the hunger in Caroline's eyes. Could she--she winced at the thought, but pursued it anyway--could she take Caroline's memory and understanding for her own use, without the blending of personalities that would destroy them? But the system offered her no such resources. It was easy enough to see that she could kill Caroline--though she would die too--but she had no greater power over her than that. Distracted for a moment, she set a security daemon to watch the nodes adjacent to the CPU. *Tell me if she approaches.* Almost at once Caroline spoke to her, across a channel she had not realized existed--not the normal procedures of the machine. *You don't have to do that. I'll warn you if I come anywhere near.* The inward voice was more than a little hurt. She hesitated for just a moment, terminated the daemon. Overwatch. Her actions were being continuously monitored. It was disturbing, almost as disturbing as the un-memory of Caroline in the CPU. It seemed to Jayhawk that her time to find a solution was limited. Sooner or later the denial of control would drive Caroline to do something rash. Dare the Lefty code, probably, hoping she could master it. That had to be prevented if at all possible. Perhaps the best approach was to work on the simpler problems first, like regaining contact with the Matrix. Perhaps Caroline would have some insight into the question of their separation. Though it irked Jayhawk to admit it, she suspected the other had more resources for addressing such problems than she did. *Caroline. I'm going to work on a probe, something to send out looking for other systems. I'll be in workroom 2-2.* *Coming.* While Caroline sat on a workbench, swinging her legs, and made occasional helpful comments, Jayhawk began constructing a device to search their enigmatic surroundings. A quick experiment showed that it had better be tethered to them; she couldn't punch a signal through the greyness without tremendous effort. Her handiwork took the form of a silvery sphere, a rotating viewpoint within it, connected to the machine by a fine silver cord. Remembering the accounts of "creatures" from the Paradisian notes on the Overnet, she made the cord deliberately fragile. Breakable, if something should seize on it. She was not totally convinced she believed in Overnet monsters--not monsters worse than the Paradisians, in any case--but it seemed a reasonable precaution. "Could you make it so I could use it?" Jayhawk shook her head. "I could, but it would be a *lot* harder. Let's see if this works, first, before we spend that kind of programming time." "Could you give me access to the datastores, then? And some kind of word processor? I want to work on a message for Yoichi, if we manage to get a transmission out." After a little consideration, Jayhawk created a daemon with permissions enough to do what Caroline wanted, call up other daemons if need be. It diluted her power a little, but it seemed safer....In occasional glances, between stages of her programming, she watched Caroline pull together a technical report. Neatly labelled sections: Paradisian personnel. HQ maps. Data on the Overnet. After a while she saved that file, started on another. She got as far as "Dear Yoichi" several times, but not much further. Jayhawk didn't envy her the problem...how to explain what had happened, that she was alive but would never come back to them? When the construct was done she said to Caroline, "Want to go fishing, see what we catch? I'd do better at this from the CPU, so maybe you want to be in the SAN, keep an eye out there." "Sure!" said Caroline fiercely. Jayhawk teleported them both-- regretted it, when she saw Caroline's expression afterwards--and they installed the probe in the SAN of their private area. Caroline sat on the filigree bridge, staring out into the grey nothing of the Overnet. "Jay--" she said as if the word pained her. "Can you whip up some attack code for me? Just in case?" "Done." Caroline drew the silver hilt from her belt, watched the blade elaborate itself, a shimmer of electric blue crystal, alive with power. Abruptly she thrust it back, extinguishing it. Her face was set. With misgivings that she could find no way to address, Jayhawk returned to the CPU, tentatively extended her consciousness out into the probe. She could see Caroline, weirdly distorted by the shape of the viewpoint, lying belly-down on the bridge, booted feet twined into its supports, as if she was afraid to fall off. She extended the probe outwards, caught a glimpse of the entire system, spread out before her almost as if in overwatch. Turned away with an effort, faced the greyness. Out and out. It was hard to judge her movement with no reference, but when she looked back along her trail she could see only the silver cord. She'd made it as long as she easily could--it was hard, supporting a process so far from the machine. Something stirred at the distorted edge of her field of vision. She rolled the viewpoint about, succeeded in making it come clear. It was a cockroach. An enormous cockroach, walking nonchalantly across the surface of the sphere. She tried to draw back, caught herself just in time before losing control of the probe altogether. A cockroach? Out here? She turned the viewpoint back toward the system, let out a yell. The silver cord was plastered with the heavy brown bodies, twisting round it in masses sometimes three or four deep. She'd built no audio, but she almost fancied she could hear the soft rustling of their movements. *Caroline! Watch out for cockroaches in the SAN!* With a thought she destroyed the probe, viewpoint winking out like an old-fashioned tridee picture. *Cockroaches?* In a brief glimpse, she saw Caroline standing at the very edge of the grey, next to the now-empty spool that had tethered the probe, blade in hand. She felt an unexpected surge of protectiveness. Without the system's power, Caroline was so vulnerable, and so precious.... Apparently she'd cut the cord in time, before anything could crawl along it to the SAN. But it was some time before they were sure nothing was coming, and could go back to their various pursuits--Jayhawk to making another probe, and Caroline to drafting and redrafting her letter. -- Dear Yoichi: The information in this packet comes from the files of Montaigne Paradisio, and from what I was allowed to see; it's the best I know, but remember that they might have lied. I have been their prisoner, and I do not know if I am free yet. Perhaps someday we'll be able to meet again, but for now it seems best that I not compromise your mission. You should bear in mind that anything I knew, they may know now. I wish you the best of luck. I miss you very much. Jayhawk Davies -- "Do you think he'll believe it?" said Jayhawk softly, looking up from her work. Caroline shook her head unhappily. "How could he? I'm not even sure this is worth sending. Knowledge from nowhere....*I* wouldn't believe it. It's a Paradisian trap for sure. But I have to try. Have to give them *something*...." She made a fist, beat it softly on the glassy surface of the workbench. She wants to leave, Jayhawk realized suddenly; she feels like a prisoner here. And, hard on the heels of that insight: I don't. I'm not sure I *could* leave; and I have no desire to. This is where I belong. It's no wonder we would go mad. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 36594 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!pacbell.com!att!ucbvax!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 39 Message-ID: <1991Apr20.040920.7298@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 20 Apr 91 04:09:20 GMT Sender: root@agate.berkeley.edu (Charlie Root) Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 134 [Posted from another account due to pnews problems--please reply to mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu. A number of people have asked me in email if there is an ftp site for these stories. I'm not aware of any--if one exists I would love to know-- but I can email any or all episodes if you include a working path in your letter. Mary] -- 39. Ares While Jayhawk crafted another, longer probe, Caroline paced the system, tried to think. It had quickly become apparent that her comments were more distracting than helpful. *Caroline! Intruder at SAN 1!* She stopped short where she was, on the spiralling double stairway that led down from the watchtower between sectors 1 and 2, and reached for overwatch. The system spread out about her, alive with the echos of Jayhawk's work. She could see nothing unusual. *It's gone now, whatever it was.* Jayhawk's "voice" was almost a flicker in the lightplay around her, intuition rather than sensation. She wondered if Channa's telepathy felt like that. "I didn't see anything," she said aloud, knowing she'd be heard. "I'll keep an eye out. You work." She walked back to her node, curled up on the high shelf and dedicated herself to surveillance. Overwatch was seductive; she could lose herself in the machine's rhythms, almost imagine that it was her will they mirrored and not the other's. Almost. She tried not to dwell on the difference. *Caroline, can you tease out any records of what it might have been?* She tried, searching through system logs, but there was only the single alert. She did find the traces of her own intrusion into the CPU, some hours earlier. They were stamped "Unauthorized User." After a moment, she managed to convince herself that it referred to the power that had stirred in the greyness, and not to her. When she was confident that she could stay in overwatch even if distracted, she tried out the techniques that Channa had taught her when the two of them were trying to untangle Lefty's programming. She wanted to remember what had happened in the CPU, what that code had been *doing*. The memories she had were very clear; but nothing she tried could pull forth any more. "Jayhawk? Could you help me with something?" she said at last. Sitting with her eyes closed, responding to Jayhawk's soft questions about what had happened, was...disturbing. It was very easy to relax, let the familiar voice direct her thoughts, and yet--She shook herself back to full consciousness with a start. Too easy, and somehow frightening. "Well, rats," said Jayhawk, and vanished. Caroline was left to invent increasingly sinister meanings for that statement. And to work on her message to Yoichi, sift once more through the databanks--she had to ask Jayhawk for a daemon to access the records, one more painful reminder-- contemplate their situation, cast back and forth over unrewarding ground for the scent of a solution. Finally the probe was done, and she went to guard the SAN while it unreeled, out and out into the greyness. *I see something!* said Jayhawk, excited, and after a moment Caroline, squinting into the vision-defeating sameness, could see it too. A vast cloudy shape, like a whale made up of a haze of tiny spindles, and a few larger ones embedded in its body like disjointed bones. They were moving, or it was approaching them--easiest to believe the first interpretation, since the whale was sideways-on to their system. Suddenly it pivoted, the great vague tail pointing toward them, and moved surely and quickly off and out of sight. "Jayhawk! It's getting away!" But she was not at all sure about pursuit. It had *sensed* them, that was no computer system out there. Something of the Overnet, perhaps something alive. *It's going to get away, all right. It's faster than we are. Interesting, I didn't know I had a speed limit. Live and learn.* Nearly half an hour after the whale vanished, Jayhawk said *Got something again. It looks pretty funny. What do you see?* Caroline clung to the very end of the silver bridge, shading her eyes against a non-existant glare, and eventually made out a smudge of redness. As they drew closer, it resolved into a huge ochre sphere, its surface dusted with white and brown. Two small, black bodies, oblong and irregular as potatoes, circled it. *Mars?* said Jayhawk in puzzlement. "Good lord." Suddenly the greyness seemed deeper, more hostile.... Could they really be that far from home? A thought struck her, and she burst out laughing. "Jay, isn't that Ares Microtech--Seattle division? You remember the big splash their new installation made, how jealous everyone was of the setup? Those are the SANs, those moon things." *Oh!* A moment's pause, a tiny shift in the flow of lights around her. Stately as a dancer, their system began to rotate around the turning globe, lockstepped with one of the moons. *You're absolutely right. Caroline, I can't sense anything beyond this one machine--can you?* There was an odd note in Jayhawk's "voice"--Caroline puzzled over it as she scanned the surrounding nothingness for other systems. Almost envy. "I don't see anything, no." Aloud, Jayhawk said behind her, "I don't see how we're going to navigate, then--how we can find Chalker's Gate or anything else we need. Unless you could do something from down there; and I don't want to risk that yet, not without a way for you to get back." Caroline pondered that, watching the world turn beneath them, the moons' shadows chasing one another over its surface. Their own system cast none. "Beacons," she said after a moment. "That's what the Paradisians use to get from one Gate to another--it was in those records. And I think that's what the bright light at Wired Lightning was--the beacon of the broken Gate there, still shining. Can you do that?" Softly, Jayhawk said, "Are you brighter than I am, as well as more perceptive?" "I don't think so," said Caroline carefully. "I remember better, that's most of it. Can you do it--make us a beacon to find this place again?" *Yes.* The word danced in the light-play, like a stray spark from the brilliance into which Jayhawk flung herself and vanished. Caroline sighed deeply, and settled herself on the bridge to wait. -- Mary Kuhner 4/19/91 Article 36763 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!mips!spool.mu.edu!uwm.edu!bionet!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 40 Message-ID: <1991Apr22.171205.6780@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 22 Apr 91 17:12:05 GMT Sender: root@agate.berkeley.edu (Charlie Root) Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 116 [Posted from another account due to pnews problems; please reply to mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu.] 40. Parting It proved difficult, or so Jayhawk told Caroline, to make a beacon that could exist in the Overnet independent of them. After a little experimentation, Jayhawk wove long thin strands of silver instead, physical links to let them find Ares again. Like a spider probing for a new anchor, the system slid down its gossamer guidelines. After much searching, they came upon a house of cards that Caroline recognized as Harrah's Casino in Vegas. It was her impression that it and Ares were moving relative to one another, though both were never in sight at the same time to confirm it. *I think so,* said Jayhawk. *I have to keep extending the strands. Beacons would be better, if you don't mind taking a long time at it.* "Let's try to work with what we've got," said Caroline. She wanted to run the Matrix, with an itchy nervous anticipation--she wasn't entirely sure that she could leave the system and survive, but she was sure it had to be tried sooner or later, and she'd never liked waiting. The next contact they made was with a glittering form like an amoeba, moving slowly through the greyness by thrusting an empty skin forward, then flowing in to fill it. Caroline, watching anxiously at the SAN, felt the system reverse its motion, try to leave the amoeba behind. She approved of Jayhawk's decision, she decided at once. The shimmering creature came upon one of their tether lines, enfolded it with its substance. Its movement quickened, pouring down the line towards them. The line vanished suddenly--cut off from this end, Caroline could sense--and they fled. She watched the amoeba until it was out of sight. It was still groping, slowly and blindly, in their direction. *Lost again, blast it. But at least we know we can find things; though I can't say I like what we've been finding.* Caroline had to agree. Both Ares and Harrah's were top-security systems, not something she wanted to run--unless Jayhawk could duplicate the tricks the Overnet files had described, in which case *any* system was trivial. And the amoeba, and the cockroaches.... "Let's try to find Ares again," she suggested. "Interesting to see if we can." It took a long time, quartering and requartering the emptiness, but at last they found the ochre globe, and matched courses with one of its attendant moons. *Caroline. Something funny.* "What?" *It's Ares, all right. Ares' Philadelphia branch, though. Not Seattle.* "Weird." They had found it by trying to retrace their course, after all...."Put out the probe again, see if you can see any more of them." By the time Jayhawk reported failure, she had come to a decision. "I bet the best way for us to navigate is for me to be down there, giving you something to home in on. I can try for Chalker's Gate to get back. I want to send Yoichi a message; and Martha." *What are you going to say to her?* "I'm not sure yet. I'll think of something." She scuffed a booted toe along the glittering metal of the bridge. "I can't do much to help you, here." Something seized her around the waist. She let out a yelp, then recognized Jayhawk. "Don't die!" said the other fiercely in her ear. "And don't get lost! We need you." "I won't," she said, not turning around--she was afraid that if she did she'd do something stupid. "I'll be fine. Don't *you* get lost! And watch out for that amoeba!" "Let me try to whip up a connector--you can take the other end with you, maybe anchor it in Ares. We need communications." Jayhawk squeezed her possessively. "I need your advice, your insight." "And I need you to play Overnet tricks for me. What was that in the files about being able to make any node act as the CPU?" Jayhawk released her. "I can't do that," she said slowly. "You can--" "*I* can?" The possibility staggered her. Inside any system in the world, if she could only reach its SAN.... "--But you mustn't. 'In control of a CPU,' remember? The Lefty code will get you." Caroline swore, at length and passionately. "Just have to do it the hard way, then. If I can get communications set up, we can see what we can manage together." "Be careful," Jayhawk whispered. Caroline turned at last, saw her image standing with fists clenched at her sides, silver-blue eyes fixed on her. The lights of the system danced in her black hair, slicked the silver of her clothing. So lovely-- She turned away sharply, addressed herself to the problem of reaching Ares. It was simple enough; she knew how, as soon as she thought of trying. A single step into the emptiness. For just an instant in the transition she could see the Net spread out around her, systems like constellations, glittering links and patterns that went out and out to the unseen horizon, dazzling in their multitudes like the stars of the sky beyond Earth's sky. *Jayhawk! Look!* But there was no answer. -- Mary Kuhner 4/20/91 Article 37040 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!apple!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Power-gaming characters Message-ID: <1991Apr25.190238.21454@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 25 Apr 91 19:02:38 GMT Sender: root@agate.berkeley.edu (Charlie Root) Organization: /etc/organization Lines: 116 [Please reply to mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu, not this account.] As a small contribution to the munchkin/powergamer controversy, I thought I would post one of the most powerful characters I've ever played: Duende, Master of Ashgate, from Shadowrun. I don't think that the statistics are particularly necessary or important; it's enough to say that he's *extremely* good both on the Matrix and at ranged or close-in combat. His claim to be faster than anything human is not much exaggerated, and he comes close to being immune to magic (unless the caster is extremely powerful). It would take two or three years to get a starting character this powerful at the rate of advancement we use, and even then there are aspects of Duende's power that would be hard to achieve. He's also stark raving mad, though in a very controlled fashion. It's difficult to see how the particular enjoyment I get from playing Duende could be duplicated by a weaker, "less munchkin" character. Background: Duende is a renegade operative from the Peruvian operation called Montaigne Paradisio; he was in charge of the Matrix Gate at Ash, which allows shipment of people and equipment to the Paradisian colony in Antarctica. (Although he can use Gates, he does not have the priest training to create one.) He was responsible for dealing with any attack against or through the Gate, and was also occasionally called on to deal with external threats. He and his brothers once killed a Dragon. Montaigne Paradisio is supposedly ruled by a Dragon Technomancer, backed up by a number of very powerful High Priests. Duende ranked just below the High Priests, though in a different branch of the organization. He has never seen the Lord, and is not sure he believes in him. He appears to be about 46 years old, South American descent, with steel- grey hair, grey eyes and tan skin. He believes that his appearence is a matter of preference in the real world, just as on the Matrix; he's not sure how old he is. He runs naked in the Matrix, depending on speed and skill rather than hardware. He's good, though a top-rate decker is better. This is what he would say of himself: -- I am Duende, one of the Lord's Specials, keeper of the Gate at Ash. Matrix runner, field operative, commander of Jaguar Knights. I was born and bred to the Lord's service. I think. I have five brothers, keepers of the other Gates. They're seriously unstable. One of them thinks he's a cat; he keeps a stockyard full of people to satisfy his craving for flesh. They are very like me, though with different specialties. Perhaps they're clones with superimposed minor differences. The priests have experimented with such things. I remember having a family, growing up in a village in Peru, though I always knew that I was a Special. I remember taking in a stray dog and teaching him tricks. The dog came to me in my dreams and showed me my memories of him. They were false. On the Matrix it is important to be able to tell the true construct from the deception, and once I looked at them full on, I was sure. There is no memory that I know to be true. There is one, at least, that I know to be false. As a Special, I have a good deal of freedom. There is no one set to watch us. If I were to kill one of my people it would not be questioned, unless he were a priest. And I have used that freedom. I have walked in the lands around the High Temple. They are dying. The Temple is painted with vines and serpents, but all around it the forest is falling to ash. Every morning I wake up and wonder whether the previous day really happened. I try not to look back. I know that the past doesn't exist, that the ground I walk on crumbles away as soon as I step forward. But it's not good to think about this too much. The base in Seattle has been having trouble with a group of independents. They shut down one of the priests' projects and have been seriously hampering operations. They destroyed a Gate. High Priest Aliantha has one of her Specials on it, but I know him; he will take his time, play with them for months before he kills them. The Lord tolerates even inefficiency in those who are sufficiently creative. Or perhaps He sleeps, and the priests rule. Everything is falling apart in a welter of squabbling and politics. It was not like this in the old days. I think. If I ever had a family they are all dead. I would like to believe that I did. I will walk the paths of the Gate to Seattle, in the flesh, as I am not accustomed to do; and in the grey between I will look for something to pursue me. And if I am faster--and I am very fast, no human can match me--I will lead it onto the Seattle base. I have reprogrammed the bio- sensors and the cortex bomb. When they do not find me and their sensors tell them nothing, they will assume that I am dead, at least for a little. Things come through the Gates which are beyond all dealing with. Even a Special could die. And then I will see what these people are, what they're worth. The past crumbles. The forest dies. Someday I will have nowhere to stand. I am not sure that even opposing the Lord will prove my reality. I don't see any other way to do it. Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu Article 37062 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!apple!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 41 Message-ID: <1991Apr26.031740.16651@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 26 Apr 91 03:17:40 GMT Sender: root@agate.berkeley.edu (Charlie Root) Organization: /etc/organization Lines: 260 [Please reply to mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu, not this account.] 41. Visitor The "place" in the grey sameness of the Overnet to which Martha's trace led her proved to be an orbit of a large corporate system which she didn't recognize. Moored in it, turning with the turning of the larger system as if they were somehow coupled, was an intricate trefoil of metal, glass, and light, delicate silver bridges standing open to the outside. She parked on one, rather disturbed by the lack of barriers. A bell chimed softly as if announcing her--good. So it wasn't *totally* wide-open, at least. The node to which the bridge led was crafted out of thin silver-steel mesh set with panels of black glass, the whole thing threaded with hair-fine strands of fiberoptics, pulsing with light. Somehow it reminded her of Aliantha's system, though there were no plants, no animals, nothing but the life of the machine. She found it lovely, but terribly harsh--nowhere to rest the eye, nothing designed for comfort or hominess. She was looking at a column of flowing lights, trying to decode their message, when they resolved themselves into form. A young woman dressed in silver glittering with the reflections of the machine, hair black as the empty spaces beyond it, eyes wide and silver-blue and hostile. She drifted out of the light-play like a ghost, stood staring. "Hello, Jayhawk," said Martha gently. She understood the hostility, at least in part; after all, she was trespassing. "I got your mail." "Hello, Martha." A cool clear voice, giving away nothing. "You should put some security on these nodes--the system's wide open, I didn't see anything but the warning bell." If she could leave the girl with no other message, *that* was important. "I'd been thinking that, but other things seemed more pressing." Was that a flush across her pale cheeks? It was hard to tell; despite the light-shimmer everywhere, the system was rather dark, at least to Martha's aging eyes. "I'll work on it." "That's good. It's not safe this way." She looked around in open admiration. "It's lovely, Jay. A little dim, but very elegant." "Thank you." Still icy. Martha sighed inwardly. She'd been hoping for a tour, but clearly it wasn't going to happen. "I'm glad to see you doing so well," she ventured. "We were all worried, especially after you...ah, broke the links to your body. But you seem to have managed to heal yourself. Are you fully Awakened?" "I don't know," said Jayhawk. She hadn't moved since her sudden appearance, as still as a part of the backdrop. "I have no idea what that would mean. Perhaps you could explain." Martha winced. Explanations...she hated giving them, afraid she'd do more harm than good. When she'd learned that Jayhawk had entered the Overnet without waiting for her advice, her first guilty reaction had been relief. Now she didn't have to try to find the perfect words, grope her way through the minefields of too much and too little. "I'm not sure I can, it's so different from one person to another. You've done so well already--you may not think so, but it's true--creating this...." "What was it like for you?" She sighed deeply. "Very different. Perhaps I can tell you sometime, but I can't stay here long; I'm needed back home." It was a half-truth. She *couldn't* stay long, even with help--she gripped the bike more tightly, leaning into its support. But her pride rankled at admitting that. "If--" She stopped cold, truly looking at Jayhawk for the first time, *seeing* what she'd been talking to. "Oh!" she said aloud in startlement. "You're not, are you? Not healed, just barely Awakened. Oh, Jay. I'm sorry, I didn't realize." "I'm not," said the construct--no, she mustn't think that way, it *was* Jayhawk, in a sense--"not what you people intended, no. It's cost me." "Can you tell me what happened?" "When I was captured by Lefty, he and Aliantha played some games with my mind. They nearly killed me, here. What I've done was the only way I could find to survive their meddling. As to what they did--you might know better than I." The hostility was very near the surface. "Do you know what effects the, ah, programming had?" "Executed on Osiris, it dumped the operating sytsem, pulled in power from across the University grid, and was apparently working on Awakening the machine when we dumped it." "I see." The decker's hatred was a little clearer now. Such dumping must have nearly destroyed the Osiris system; a clear and personal threat, to a creature whose existance was utterly bound to her machine. "Trigger code. It's a kind of catalyst, Jay--it makes things happen, but I couldn't tell you just what they intended. Maybe only the people who did the programming could. Aliantha--" "It killed her," said Jayhawk with icy self-satisfaction. "Yes. I know," said Martha, feeling suddenly weary. "And Lefty is dead too." "I asked him. He wouldn't tell me." A shiver went through her. "I'm sorry. I wish I could help." She took a deep breath, wondering once again how to say what she must say. It was her own initiative, not the Lord's, but no easier for that. "Jayhawk, your body will die eventually if the disharmony between you continues. It's deteriorating, slowly but surely." "'Slowly.' How long?" When Martha hesitated, Jayhawk went on sharply, "Order of days? Years?" How could she answer that question honestly, without telling too much? "It's hard to predict, but....The dying itself could take a long time, order of...perhaps a year. But within a month or so the deterioration will be come, ah--" "Irrevocable." She nodded. "I'm surprised there's anything left at all, after what I had to do." Jayhawk stared at her for a long moment. She felt as if she should say something, but her mind was suddenly blank. The hostility hurt far more than she'd anticipated. She hadn't realized how fond she'd become of the girl. "Martha, what has *he* said about me? Are you here on his orders?" She shook her head. "All He told me was what had happened to you. I came because of your--ah! Not your mail, but *hers*. Where is she? On the Matrix?" "Presumably." Did that curt answer hide self-hatred, Martha wondered, or only hostility towards her? "Are things so terrible between you, then? I hoped--" For an instant loneliness and anxiety were naked on Jayhawk's face; as if realizing it, she ducked her head, her features lost in the shimmer from below. "She's looking for what we need. I'm glad you heard from her, that must mean she's all right--" "Can't you tell?" "I would know if she died. I would die. Beyond that--" She fought herself under control, cool and detached once more. "We can't be one again as things stand; we'll go crazy. She says this, and I believe her." She was hoping, Martha realized, that Martha would tell her otherwise. The separation must be terrible for both of them. "Yes, I understand," she said sympathetically. One attuned, one not...it was very likely true. "You must have seen something like this before." "Not really. It's very different from one person to another." "What was Aliantha like?" "Rather like you, though more fay, somehow, more...elfin?" She shook her head. "It's hard to describe." "What was it like for you?" "Very, very different." Distance and isolation were tugging at her with increasing force. It was hard for her to be away from her own place for so long, even with the motorcycle's support. She clutched the handlebars more tightly, said apologetically, "I can't stay long, Jayhawk. I'm needed back home." It galled her pride, as always, to admit her limitations. She *couldn't* stay longer, but it irked her to consider explaining why. And she should not sow the seeds of a repetition of her own failure. Perhaps Jayhawk would find a better way, as she had somehow, though at terrible price, evaded the traps already laid for her. *Martha, you're jealous.* She was surprised at herself; but it was true. The accomplishments she saw around her, the greater one implicit in His report.... "Why won't you tell me anything?" said Jayhawk with savage force. "It varies too much--someone else's experience wouldn't apply; it might be worse for you than knowing nothing. I know it doesn't feel that way, but you've done very well. You've been able to make all this--and it's beautiful, Jayhawk, it's a marvellous accomplisment. If you can just find a way to harmonize--" In a voice of bitter certainty, Jayhawk said, "I won't serve you. Not to be one again, not to save my body, not even to live." "Child, I don't want you to serve me." Was that ambiguous enough? She had the feeling she was treading on eggshells. "I won't serve *him*." "I'm not asking you to. I just thought you might want to know. Jay, I have faith in you--I think you can reconcile your differences, bring yourself into harmony with her--have you named her yet?--with your system...." She let the least note of pleading enter her voice. "I want you to live, I really do. But the method will have to be your own. I can't help you there." She swung herself back onto the seat, isolation prickling along her nerves. "Work's piling up for me, you know how it is." "Martha!" Almost a snarl. "Isn't there *anything* concrete you can tell me?" "What do you need to know?" "Are amoebas dangerous? How about cockroaches? How do you navigate on the Overnet? How can I get in touch with *her*?" A flood of questions. "Are things that move more likely to be bad than things that don't?" Amoebas? Cockroaches? She wondered what Jayhawk had encountered, shuddered again at the openness of the system. "Anything can be dangerous, though I guess things that move are more likely to be so. It's best not to approach anything that you're not familiar with and not, ah, interested in. Navigation, well, you set up beacons, you work with landmarks. You feel your way, sort of." It was increasingly hard to stay here, deny the tugging. "I'm going to talk to *her* next, I'll do what I can to help. But I can't stay any longer, especially if I'm going to do that. Please take care of yourself, Jay. Eat lots of chicken soup, don't stay up too late--I really don't know what I can tell you. Cherish your system. That's important." A little more gently, Jayhawk said, "Take care of yourself, Martha." "If you really need to ask me a particular question, you always know where to reach me." "How?" "You can't--No, I suppose you can't. I can give you a message drone, though it would have to be a process on this system. If you'll give me permission?" "Granted," said Jayhawk, clipping the word off short. Martha conjured a drone, felt it sink its runners into the node. She could sense that she was being closely observed, by Jayhawk and...others. "I guess you didn't keep the gnomes," she said, sad and a little hurt. Nothing responded to her call. "They didn't seem to fit," said Jayhawk without sympathy. "Thanks for the information, Martha." A little more warmth, or was it her imagination? She wished she were more sure. "You're welcome. Goodbye, Jayhawk." -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 37427 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wuarchive!uunet!stanford.edu!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 42 Message-ID: <1991May1.002253.6075@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 1 May 91 00:22:53 GMT Sender: root@agate.berkeley.edu (Charlie Root) Organization: /etc/organization Lines: 134 [Please reply to mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu, not this account.] 42. Gift It was easy enough for Martha to find the other Jayhawk, tracing the link from the Overnet; it led her to the University of Philadelphia, where Jay was reading netnews off a student account. Martha hesitated in the entry to the node, cleared her throat. "I got your message." The decker whirled, then said with studied calmness, "Hello, Martha." She was strikingly identical to the one Martha had talked to on the Overnet, though plainer, somehow, without the scintillant background of her system. "I've just been talking to your...to the other one. Ah, this is a little confusing." It was hard to organize her thoughts to explain the same thing again, doubly hard with the continual and increasing pull of Paradisio on her. "If it helps, by convention I'm Caroline, and she's Jayhawk." That was patently the wrong way around, it seemed to Martha--lessened though this was, she was the original Jayhawk (as far as that had meaning), the bearer of their magic and Awakening. She wondered what that might imply. Had she given away her name with the Key? "Caroline, your body is deteriorating--will die, eventually, if you don't overcome your disharmony, reestablish your links to it." In a sharp voice, the decker said, "My body should be *dead*, Martha. I felt what happened, what I did. I *nuked* it. I'm surprised there was enough left to scrape up with a spatula." "Well, it wasn't that bad--you're recovering. Or...did you mean to divorce yourself from your body permanently? Because if so, we could have it destroyed." She waited anxiously for the answer, trying not to remember similar questions posed to Aliantha. "No. None of that was my intention." She looked up, frowning, killed the news process with a quick gesture. "Martha, why are you here? *He* condemned me to death; I'm an enemy of yours. What do you want from me?" Biting back the sting of that, or trying to, Martha said; "He didn't condemn you to death; He can't, I think. It's the only thing...." No. A dangerous topic, too dangerous in her current state of mind. "I'm not your enemy, J-Caroline. Not unless you want it that way. I got your message, and I hoped I could help in some way." Caroline was staring at her with a mixture of mistrust, curiosity, and--was it hunger? She hoped there was some friendship in it too. She wished she were more certain. "So what do you want? Are you going to try to convince me to come back?" "No, much as I would like to. I just wanted....I've spoken with your other. She seems....I think she's slipping." More harshly than she'd intended--the mistrust hurt, as always--"Are you slipping, Caroline?" "The situation seems stable to me, given what we have to deal with." Anger and pain. Martha sighed. "I know. You have my sympathies.--I worked with your software a little, made some improvements. How is it?" Caroline called a construct up, waved it in the air. It was an odd cross between her usual mirrorshades and a pair of old-fashioned wire- rimmed sunglasses. "It's not clear to me that this is an improvement." "They'll work in the Overnet now, and...other places." "Thanks, then," said Caroline, a little dubiously. And, with an obvious effort to be friendly, "You know a lot about the Overnet--I saw your name in the files, over and over again. The only one, toward the end. How come? How could they have such an opportunity and not--" "People just lost interest," said Martha painfully, remembering years when she'd asked the same question time and again. "They changed. People like Aliantha....Megan was a good girl, I enjoyed working with Megan very much. Aliantha was...different." "Can you tell me anything, anything about the Overnet that might help me? The records were very incomplete." "I can't stay long." So tedious, the same argument again. She fought to keep irritation out of her voice. She'd been gone *much* too long. "Ah--the other one asked me about the trigger code that Lefty and Aliantha apparently did. I was going to ask Doc about it--he must know, though it's odd that he didn't mention....Anyway, I'll send you a report." "Thanks." A little more warmth. "And I brought you a present. It occurred to me that you wouldn't have any way of getting back, as things are now." "I have a few ideas about that problem," said Caroline with icy independence. "Yes. Well, I had a couple of constructs around that I thought you might find use for." She fished a pair of darts threaded on soft velvet ribbons from her pocket. "These will let you get back, once each." "Ruby slippers!" "I didn't think you liked--" She realized that Caroline was trying to be friendly, caught herself. "That's it, yes." "How do they work?" "You put one on--" She demonstrated, wrapping the velvet around her wrist. The temptation to finish the process, make the tiny effort of will to activate the construct, *return*...."And then you just, ah, go there. You'll see when you try it." Caroline accepted the darts cautiously, looked them over, tucked them into a belt loop. "Use them carefully," Martha cautioned. "I don't have any more." Caroline nodded, said with, perhaps, more curiosity than hostility, "How did you find me?" "You're a beacon on the Overnet; it's very easy. I, ah, I *have* to go. I'm sorry. Please take care, J-Caroline. If there's anything I can do to help, let me know." With voice and expression so like the other's it was uncanny, Caroline said, "You take care, Martha." Had she guessed, did she understand? Martha felt her cheeks reddening. Briskly, she pulled down her motorcycle helmet, left the node--let the tugging take her, draw her back to the embrace of...home. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 37557 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!linac!att!ucbvax!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 43 Message-ID: <1991May2.135134.21863@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 2 May 91 13:51:34 GMT Sender: root@agate.berkeley.edu (Charlie Root) Organization: /etc/organization Lines: 200 [Please reply to mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu, not this account.] 43. Piebald Furious, though whether at Martha or at herself she wasn't quite sure, Jayhawk started working on IC for the system accesses. Something lightweight at first, she decided, a stopgap while she constructed real barriers. It was going to take a while. She was engrossed in her coding, the guts of the construct sprawled out across the working surface of one of the larger nodes, when she heard a soft unexpected tinkle of bells. She looked up, startled, saw a face peering into her node from the stairway that spiraled down to it. A very thin face, beaked nose and pointed lips, wearing a long floppy cap with bells on each of its dangling tips. He smiled at her conspiratorially, said "It worked!" and vanished. She interrogated the system access daemons, found no records of an intrusion after Martha's. She probed the message drone, sitting patiently on its rails waiting to be launched into the Overnet, but it seemed innocent. Doubly furious, she returned to her work. She couldn't rid herself of the idea that Caroline would have been able to find the intruder at once. He also seemed naggingly familiar, though she could no more place him in memory than in space. She'd set up the basic framework of the code, was beginning the long task of laying out the decision branching, when she heard the bells again. "Come in!" she snapped, hoping to get a better look at the thing. He walked in, sat down calmly on empty air across the table from her. He was dressed head to toe in something much like his hat, a loose shapeless mass of clothing in several dissonant colors, bells sewn to it at intervals. "Hello?" he said tentatively, looking sideways at her. His eyes were blue and very bright. "Hello," said Jayhawk, not warmly. The system denied to her that anything was there at all, either process or user. "I'm Jayhawk. Who are you?" "I'm Jayhawk too," he said teasingly. "But you can call me something else if you like." He turned his head the other way, birdlike; the eye on that side was yellow. "Would you come if I did?" She was at a loss for what to do. The presence of a stranger in her system made her want to snarl and bark. But if the system denied his presence she doubted she could affect him all all. *Caroline! Where are you when I need you?* "Would I come if you what?" "Called you. Not much point having a name if you don't come when you're called." "Sometimes. Should I always come?" For an instant he looked at her straight on. His face was even narrower than she'd thought, rather grotesquely so; he looked much more human from the side. Somehow the effect was more humerous than frightening. She was *sure* now she'd seen him before. "Why are you here in the first place?" Had the Dragon sent him? He leaned forward, said in a conspiratorial voice, "I'm not one of *his*, you know. I'm one of yours." At last she remembered where she'd seen him before. When she was being held captive in the High Temple, fairly early on when she'd still hoped to use Kurt's code to escape....He'd poked his head into her room one morning, said in a bright voice "Try Tsimshan!" and vanished before she could reply. She'd made a mental note--not in headware memory, despite the temptation--planning to try it as a password, should she ever be balked by the lack of one. But she never had. "One of my what? Where did you come from?" He put a thoughtful finger to his lips. "From the CPU, just now." Jayhawk bristled; he went on, seemingly unperturbed, "I'm not quite sure, before that." "Was it you who came into my room at Paradisio?" "Yes! That was me." He seemed to regard it as a revelation. "Why did you say 'try Tsimshan?' What's a Tsimshan?" "I don't know. I noticed you were stuck, and it seemed like it might be helpful. It must have worked, right? You're not stuck anymore--are you?" "Depends on what you mean by stuck. What were you doing there?" "I don't know," he said sadly. "I was hoping you could tell me." She burst into sudden, nervous laughter. "Are you sure you aren't a gnome in disguise?" "Oh no," he said. "Those are Martha's. I'm yours." He looked around the node with apparent interest. "What are you doing?" "Barrier IC. You know anything about IC programming?" For some reason she was almost inclined to believe him, though her system still insisted that he wasn't there. Hers. An interesting thought. (Caroline should be mine. Dammit, Caroline should be *here*!) "A little bit." He leaned over the table, beaked nose nearly touching the spread-out code, crooked a long finger at it. "Hey, why don't you try this?" With surprising speed he made connections, pulling things together. She watched in puzzlement. She couldn't follow everything he was doing, but it looked unreasonable, what she could follow--nonsensical, even. When he stopped short, said with disappointment "Not quite sure what to do next," he'd assembled a solid day's work, nearly half the project. "You're not so bad after all," she said, prodded the code to expose its internal structure. It began to unravel instantly--she'd been right, those constructions *were* illogical. In a moment his work had been reduced to a heap of dysfunctional subroutines piled on the solid framework of hers. "Oops," he said regretfully. "I guess that wasn't it." Her own code seemed undamaged; thoughtfully, she saved away a copy of it just in case he tried further tricks. "What else do you do? Any idea on communicating with the Matrix?" "No, sorry. That's Caroline's job, isn't it?" "I hoped there was something I could do from here." He shook his head with a soft, mournful jingle. *So he knows about Caroline, does he? What is this thing?* "Why did you come?" "Just to see how you were doing. I suppose I should go again and not bother you," he said even more mournfully. "Go where?" "I don't know." He uncurled himself from his invisible chair, shook the points of his cap behind him. "I was hoping you could tell me." "You can stay here a while, as long as you behave yourself," she said impulsively. And, bending again over her code, "What's the first thing you remember?" Like her similar conversation with the gnomes, that didn't lead anywhere in particular; but it was pleasing to have company, even inexplicable company. He made another set of suggestions for the code, radically different from the first ones but, as it developed, equally unworkable. She restored from her backup copy and went on. The distraction didn't seem to bother her, no more than fatigue or boredom. Five or six fiascoes later, he strung her code together into a rather handsome latticework of falling droplets, silver and electric blue. She poked at the construct, a little curious to see how it would fall apart this time. It didn't. "Hey, careful!" he said anxiously. "You'll break it!" She snorted. "This is Barrier IC, silly. If I can break it by simple manipulations it's garbage anyway." But it stood up to her probes, seemed to be working perfectly. She was impressed; she'd been hours or days from finishing. "It works?" He clapped his angular hands together, jingling. "Are you going to install it?" She hesitated. She'd never liked using someone else's software, certainly not for something as important as protecting the system. But it *looked* like her own work; it fit the system metaphor, the constructions she examined looked right. And it was only meant as a stopgap, after all. "Guess so. We'll see how it works in practice." So they strung falling droplets across the silver bridges, and Jayhawk tested them carefully. She could find no flaw. It wasn't good IC, just a first approximation, but well-made for what it was. "It's very pretty," said the jester approvingly. "Though I think this place could use a few more bright colors, to go with me." "Humph." She recalled a similar statement by the supervisory daemon. Was that was this was, a rogue daemon? But she couldn't perceive him as such, if so. And she'd seen him in the High Temple. "I think I'll call you Piebald," she commented, not entirely kindly. "Oh," he said, sounding a little disappointed; and then, perking up, "What next?" "Better IC, first. Then I'm going to take apart Martha's drone and see if I can figure out how it works." Waiting for Caroline. In a way she'd never been happier, living in such an abundance of beauty and power; but the single lack cut all the deeper for that. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 37759 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!swrinde!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!stanford.edu!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 44 Message-ID: <1991May4.142159.4171@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 4 May 91 14:21:59 GMT Sender: root@agate.berkeley.edu (Charlie Root) Organization: /etc/organization Lines: 186 [Please reply to mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu, not this account.] 44. Yoichi Yoichi jacked in from the hotel entertainment console, wincing at the static in the connection, and checked his mail in Seattle. Duende had warned him not to display anything on-screen, in case the room was monitored, though his careful eyeball search had revealed nothing. The first two messages were routine requests for system info. The third had a garbage return address, suggesting that it had been sent from the Matrix. It was long, too, a good fifteen K. He pulled up the first page on the virtual reader he was using. The name leaped out at him first; the rest of the text only after a moment. 'Perhaps someday we'll be able to meet again, but for now it seems best that I not compromise your mission.' 'Anything I knew, they may know now.' 'I miss you very much.' He jacked out hastily, a stab of discomfort across already strained nerves, and turned to his roommate. Duende was stretched out on the bed, apparently sound asleep. To Yoichi's taste it was one of his most annoying traits; he could sleep anywhere, anytime, no matter what worries they had. He almost called Duende's name, remembered in time that the room might be bugged. "Manuel? Come have a look at this, will you?" Graceful as if he hadn't been asleep at all, Duende got up, joined him at the terminal. There was no provision for two to jack in; Yoichi called up the message on-screen, fairly confident that his body and Duende's would block out any camera. He'd already checked that the terminal wasn't echoed elsewhere. An easy task: Argentine hotel security was even worse than South African. Duende reached over his shoulder, scrolled through the message at a rate Yoichi couldn't begin to follow. He caught words here and there: Jayhawk's name, technical terms, fragments of description. "Why don't we go out and have a sandwich?" said Duende. Hastily, Yoichi cleared the screen, threw on his parka. Once outside, in the raw cold of the sourthern Argentinian night, he burst into words. "What do you think? Could it really be Jayhawk? Was the stuff in the report accurate? Is it a trap?" "I'm not sure," said Duende thoughtfully. "The description of the High Temple is different from what I remember, but that might be correct. The description of Martha certainly matches. The rest would be a priest matter, something I might not know about." "But is it *Jayhawk*? Or a Paradisian trick?" He slipped on a patch of ice, caught himself. "How could she be alive after that explosion?" Patiently, Duende said, "I think you're missing a third possibility: that it is both Jayhawk *and* a Paradisian trick. That would be very much in their style. One can imagine several ways they could have captured her." "How can we find out? What can we *do*? Are we in danger?" "I don't think we can find out, not readily, not without jeopardizing what we're doing. The information is interesting, and it may be of value, especially as a cross-check with things we learn from other sources. I don't know whether we're in immediate danger or not, though it's certainly a bad idea to stay here past tonight. We were planning to leave anyway." He ducked into a shop, returned in a moment with two steaming cups of miso. Yoichi accepted one, wrapped his hands around its warmth. "How can we go on," he said slowly, "without knowing? Whether it's Jayhawk, whether it's a trick, whether there's something we can *do*?" He wanted to throw the cup at Duende, force some kind of reaction out of that damned blank face. "What am I going to say in return?" "Did it sound like Jayhawk to you?" "Yes. No, not really. I'm not sure. Maybe if she had a lot of time to revise it. It sounded more like Channa pretending to be Jayhawk, if you see what I mean." She's *dead*. I finally accepted that, it finally stopped hitting me from behind when I wasn't expecting it...and now this.... "It would be better not to answer at all. But I leave it to your discretion. I would not recommend decking in to do so. Your mailbox is a very unsafe place right now, whether this message is accurate or not." Duende sipped at his own soup, glanced around, a quick flicker of eyes. "You might forward the message to Casey if you can contrive a safe way to do so. Channa knew Jayhawk quite well. Her opinion would be interesting." "Right." A little soup slopped over the rim, burned his fingers. "I'll see what I can do." "We should go back, then. We have a train to catch at six." They returned to the hotel room, where Duende promptly went to sleep. Yoichi read slowly through the tech report--it was quite lengthy, and fairly hard to digest, let alone believe. Then he tried to compose a reply. What tack to take? Friendly and trusting? "Jayhawk, let us know what's wrong--we're your friends, we want to help." Suspicious? "Prove you're Jayhawk." Curious? "What the hell is going on?" Hurt? "How can you do this to me?" That last was pretty close to how he felt.... Or there was the Duende approach: "Interesting information. What do you want in return?" Or the hostile: "We know what you're up to, and it won't work, you impostor." He only wished he were more sure. It sounded...it almost sounded like Jayhawk. At last, after a great deal of backspacing, he put a message in his own mailbox: Jayhawk: I'm grateful for the information, but it would help us use it if you explained a little more what's going on. We're very concerned about you. Yoichi He sat up, pretending to read news, waiting for a reply. It came in about half an hour. Yoichi, You must not try to meet me on the Matrix, no matter how much you want to. The Paradisians know exactly where I am at all times, and are probably keeping me under surveillance. You shouldn't stay where you are physically, either: and under no conditions tell me where you are or what you are doing! Aliantha was killed in the explosion of the Hidden Fortress. The Paradisians want me to be her successor. I am loose, for the moment, but not free. That's a problem I have to deal with by myself; you can't help me, and you'll endanger yourselves if you try. I will *not* willingly contact you either physically or on the Matrix, and if someone comes to you claiming, however convincingly, to be me, you shouldn't trust them. If you must get in touch with me, try the return address of this message. Jayhawk It was a University of Philadelphia student account. She was probably using her standard trick of mailing from the account of someone who'd dropped a course. Yoichi caught himself. Did that mean he believed this was Jayhawk? But it didn't quite sound like Jayhawk; or, perhaps, like Jay on the night of the final attack, unnaturally calm and clear- minded and determined. Not the person he knew. What had happened to her, if it was her? He tried to imagine what the training of a High Priestess might be. He wished he could ask Duende, but didn't have the nerve to wake him up. When dawn came and it was time to leave for the train station he was still sitting in front of the blank terminal, brooding. He'd set it to beep softly if he received more mail. Just as he was ready to log off it did so. The message was from Kurt at the University of Washington. Just a short note--"You know anything about this?"--prepended to a message with a Matrix-mail address. Professor: Could you please recommend researchers and/or clinicians who have both experience with the Matrix and with issues of mind control and deprogramming? I would be very grateful. Seeker It had an explicit return address at the end of the file, not where it had been sent from. The same address. -- Copyright 1991 Mary Kuhner Article 37944 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!decwrl!stanford.edu!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 45 Message-ID: <1991May7.025825.6114@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 7 May 91 02:58:25 GMT Sender: root@agate.berkeley.edu (Charlie Root) Organization: /etc/organization Lines: 146 [Please reply to mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu, not this account.] 45. Osiris Three days of solid work--amazing how many hours there are in a day when you don't need to sleep--made it clear to Caroline that psychologists publicly involved in the kind of work she was interested in could be found in just three places. The Center For The Treatment Of Torture And Brainwashing in Copenhagen. The University of Texas in Houston. And the University of Quebec in Montreal. The Copenhagen clinic had a waiting list several hundred entries deep. She toyed with the on-line copy, decided against trying to hack it. A letter of inquiry brought back a prompt and polite but rather discouraging response: they accepted only patients referred to them by qualified practicioners. She poured over articles put out by the Houston and Montreal groups. Most of them were incomprehensible, though she did learn the names of the top people in each team. A scan of the Net indexed off those names proved more interesting. Gregor McDougall at the University of Texas was rumored to have treated an escapee from Aztlan; the Net account made his work sound like something out of a spy thriller, replete with narrow escapes, hidden spies, black magic and jaguar assassins. The scientific literature held none of this, only some vague generalities and a number of statements by McDougall to the effect that he was not prepared to discuss the case at this time. However, it was clear that the federal government had been directly involved in U Texas security for quite a while. So. How to get him interested? Stealing money to pay him didn't jibe with her decker's ethics--not that that had always stopped her in the past--and in any case he was probably rolling in wealthy patients. She had to offer something else, appeal to his curiosity, provide a challenge. She had to prove she was *real*. Otherwise the statement that she couldn't come to appointments because she hadn't any physical body would probably bring the entire thing to a halt. Crazy, yes, but how can you treat someone who won't come in to be helped? She went to Seattle, marvelling once again at how Matrix movement felt to her now--like being stretched out, thinner and thinner, until with a sudden snap she found herself at her destination. The origin, the point from which she always measured distance and to which she would return instantly if she let herself go (she'd done it several times already) was the SAN node at Ares/Philadelphia. Almost like a decker returning to her body, but not...not quite. And the very last step of the journey was in an impossible direction, beyond her reach. The communication link had shattered, too weak to take the transition, though she saw now how it would have had to be done. But until she returned there, she had no contact, no anchor but the sense of her system. Anubis. She'd known its name in the instant of transmission from the Overnet to the Matrix. She wished she could tell Jayhawk. At the back of her mind where her link to her flesh should have been, always had been when she was on the Matrix....nothing. She let herself into Osiris, her old system at the University of Washington, noting with disapproval that the new sysadmin hadn't even changed the root password. There were no deckers about--not surprising, she realized after a moment; it was nearly 5 am. She planted herself in the most powerful of the subprocessors, carefully avoiding the CPU, and considered what she could do to prove herself. 'Make or break node connections, create new nodes and destroy old ones.' So the records had said. Cautiously, shivering a little, she reached out to the furthest of Osiris' subprocessors, logically and visually unlinked to the one she was in. Something resisted her for an instant, like a heavy weight that required sustained effort to set in motion. With a soft mechanical scraping, a passageway opened up in the steel-plate wall of the node. Like the rest of Osiris, it resembled a submarine, harsh metal with naked ceiling ducts and handholds along the walls. Marvelling, she walked through it, found herself in the far subprocessor. The link required continuous concentration; it was not the system's natural state. But she could do it. She released her hold, let the system slide back to its ground state. It seemed unharmed. Caroline swore aloud, dizzied and almost sickened. It was that easy! Simply...what *had* she done? Called on her link to Anubis, accessed the Overnet representation of the machine--changed it--not simple at all, on consideration. How had she learned to do that? Could she destroy connections as well as creating them? She reached out for the power to try it--realized, in the instant's lag created by her distance from Philadelphia, what she was about to do, and cancelled the operation with a frantic thought. She'd been about to take down the barriers at Anubis' SANs, let in the grey. It was the only way to accomplish what she'd intended to do. (And how do I know *that*?) She paced the passageways of Osiris, watching a few late-night students working on programming projects, until her nerve returned. After all, she *had* averted the catastrophe. She just had to be very careful. Restricting a decker's movement, as Aliantha had hers--no. Not without letting in the grey, though the knowledge was there. Calling on CPU operations, displaying a system map or changing permission levels, from a subprocessor--she caught herself just in time. It could be done, and without excessive power draw. But it made the SUB into a CPU-emulator. Close enough to trigger Lefty's code? She wasn't about to find out the hard way. Creating a new node--that, oddly enough, she could do with effort but little difficulty, as long as she maintained its connection to this machine. She could, she sensed, create am independent node around herself, a singular bubble in the Matrix--but it would be a CPU, that single node. There were other possibilities, she was sure of it, but fear was inhibiting her ability to come up with them. Autonomous, mobile IC? Perhaps, with time--or would that require *her* to emulate a CPU for them? *Easy, Caroline. Isn't this enough for now?* It was dangerous for her even to think about performing CPU operations from another node...as if her thoughts themselves had power to warp the activities of the machine, nudge the node gradually closer and closer to invoking control and the disaster of Lefty's programming. She left Osiris hastily when she noticed what she was doing to her surroundings, stood shivering in the interspace between systems, the less seductive framework of the telecom grid supporting her. She was torn between exultation--Look! Look what I can do!--and a kind of shame. It seemed too easy, somehow; with the full power that she could sense though she didn't dare use it, how could anyone possibly defend against her, challenge her? Except for the Paradisians, of course. It occurred to her that the speaker in darkness had asked her whether she would go to Seattle, if she were free. And here she was. Exultation and shame and intense frustration--she knew so much, she might have done so much, if it were not for the shackles in her mind. 'You are your own jailer,' he had told her. And so she was, though not by choice. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 38206 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!samsung!mips!apple!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 46 Message-ID: <1991May10.035540.13624@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 10 May 91 03:55:40 GMT References: <1991May10.035415.13081@agate.berkeley.edu> Sender: root@agate.berkeley.edu (Charlie Root) Organization: /etc/organization Lines: 156 [Please reply to mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu, not this account.] 46. Gregor Caroline broke into Dr. Gregor McDougal's office machine--no Overnet trickery, it was an antique system that she could have run in her sleep--and left a message in his personal mailbox. System records suggested that he logged in several times daily. She'd wait for him. Dr. McDougal, I understand that you and your co-workers are experts on dealing with the consequences of mind control and programming. I need your help in escaping such control; in return I can offer some of the knowledge of my captors, who are experts in magic, the Matrix, and the relationship between them. You can contact me by typing my name at system level. Jayhawk She strung the I/O nodes which controlled the system's terminals together like beads on a thread, partly to prove she could do it and partly to insure she would receive his message no matter where he chose to send it from. That accomplished--and it was surprisingly easy--she settled down to read news and wait for interminable hours. At last someone logged on--she hoped it was McDougal and not a secretary-- and began to scroll through mail. He seemed to read agonizingly slowly, line by line with inexplicable pauses between them. Perhaps, she told herself, he was talking to someone else at the same time. He didn't answer any of the messages. She watched intently as he came to hers, scrolled slowly through it. A longer than normal pause, and then he went on to the next. She almost deleted the rest of his queue, managed to restrain herself. Endless minutes later, he came to the end, sat idle for a moment--What is he doing? Is he on the phone?--and then went back to the beginning. She read his mail along with him. It was remarkably dull--requests for articles, a lunch invitation, colloquium announcements. He deleted most of them, answered a few--declined the lunch invitation, she noted. He skipped hers. Finally, when there was nothing else left in the mail queue, he returned to her message, sat idle over it (or so she couldn't help thinking) for several minutes more. At last he left the mail server and typed in at system level, at a speed that suggested one-finger hunt and peck: >Jayhawk? >Good afternoon, Dr. McDougal. I'm sorry about the unorthodox approach, >but it was the only way I felt sure of being able to get your >attention. Her virtual 'typing' was lightning-fast by comparison. She'd spent a lot of time trying to decide what to say. >Who are you? What do you want? >I've read about your work with the escapee from Aztlan. I'm in need of >similar help, though my problem is a little more arcane, and I hoped >that you might be able to provide it. I could offer a great deal of >knowledge in return, and a chance to work on a problem that I think >might interest you. >What is your real name? Her reponses were quicker than they might have been--his typing gave her plenty of time to consider them. >I was Caroline Davies of the University of Washington. I'm not sure >that that applies any longer. At the moment, I exist only on the >Matrix. > >I was captured and manipulated by an organization with a lot of arcane >power, especially on the Matrix. This is a very partial escape. If my >body still exists--they tell me that it does, but they might have >reason to lie--it's in captivity in South America. He began to type something, backspaced over the first character several times, finally came up with: >Can you provide some evidence that what you say is true? >Are there any deckers working with you? To a decker, I can easily >demonstrate that I'm something very unusual. >How about references--people who know you, or knew you? She hesitated over that. She'd sent a letter to Yoichi asking him to ask Channa for a psychiatric evalution of her problem--after all, Channa had probed her mind, and she *was* some sort of psychologist. The response had been apologetic and brief. Channa wouldn't give out that kind of information; it seemed more likely to do harm than good. >You might try Kurt Carlson, professor of Computer Science at UW. But >I will warn you that he'll think you're representatives of the people >who took me, and you'll have trouble getting him to talk. >Anyone else? >Not that would be willing to talk to you, I'm afraid. >What do you think we could do for you? >My mind's been meddled with; there's programming in there that I can't >access or control. I know some of what it does, and it's hampering me >severely; I'm even more afraid of what I don't know. They want me to >serve them. I'm afraid they may be able to force me to do so. >I see. A very long pause. She'd seen a picture of McDougal in his files, tried to imagine the big, heavy-set red-head leaning over his terminal, head perhaps in hands. The image was abstract and fuzzy. It worried her a little how easy it was to disbelieve in anything not accessable from the Matrix. >Has it ever occurred to you that you might be an AI programmed with the >memories of a human being? She started to type an indignant rebuttal, hesitated. At last: >I don't feel like an AI, but I suppose it's possible--the dividing line >can get very thin. >I see. > >Jayhawk, could you please come back tomorrow at noon--or name another >time if that one is not convenient--prepared to demonstrate what you >say you can do? My partner and I can decide at that point whether we >think we'll be able to help you. She let out a small crow of delight. It felt *good* to be called Jayhawk. And he was interested, he really was. Or else....She sobered suddenly. There were stories among deckers of the Matrix police who hunted rogue AIs. >Please don't try any tricks. I think you might easily hurt me or kill >me, and perhaps do severe damage to your own machine or lab as well. >In particular, I mustn't be forced into control or occupation of a CPU. >Please. >Understood. We could meet in a different way if that would make you >feel more secure. >It's all right. She hoped it was all right. The three days' research had shown her how terribly narrow her options were. >Until tomorrow, then. Goodbye. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 38823 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!stanford.edu!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Jayhawk 47 Message-ID: <1991May17.053851.25999@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 17 May 91 05:38:51 GMT Sender: root@agate.berkeley.edu (Charlie Root) Organization: /etc/organization Lines: 172 [Please reply to mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu, not this account.] 47. Michael Caroline was sprawled in a node in Osiris, working on a detailed report of what had happened to her in Paradisio, when she had a sudden prickling feeling that she was being watched. She whirled, found herself confronting a rather ludicrous humanoid robot, a heavy-footed construct with blinking lights on his chest and wire-grill eyes. "Hi," he said tentatively. The voice quality was much better than the image, which tended to flicker and flatten. "You, uh, you new around here?" "I used to hang out here," said Caroline, "but not recently. Just dropped in to do a little work." Hastily she saved her file out to secure storage--as secure as Osiris boasted, at least. "I didn't think I'd seen you before. I'm Michael--oops!" The image was too crude to show expression, but the voice more than made up for it. "Forked Lightning, that is." "I'm Seeker," said Caroline, trying not to laugh. He stomped a heavy foot on the decking of the node. "I'm sorry about this, it's, um, Radio Shack, you know. All I could afford to start with. Didn't realize it would be so--so--" "That can be fixed, you know. Not easily, but with some work you can tune the image to whatever you like--and you should, it's no good working with a non-intuitive persona." "You *can*? I kind of figured I was stuck with it." "Sure. It's a good idea to think it out thoroughly first--What would I look like if I could look however I wanted? Once you settle on a Matrix image it's hard to change, so you want to get it right." She shook her head, night-black hair rustling around her shoulders. "I actually look like this, almost, and though it's kind of nice it wasn't exactly the cleverest thing I ever did." As if a dam had broken, he deluged her with confidences. He'd been on the Matrix only a couple of days, this was his first semester at the U, and he was dying of impatience to find new worlds and conquer them but had not the faintest idea how to go about it. Pressed on her own background, she described herself as a would-be systems and IC programmer; he was enchanted. "Um, are you really female?" he asked diffidently after half an hour's talk. "Sure am. Like I said, I look more or less like this, though not quite so pretty." A sudden shiver of horror--What might I look like, now? What does 'deteriorating' mean? "Are you free tonight?" She laughed apologetically. "I'm in Philadelphia." It was true, in a way. She could feel the distant tug of Anubis. "You *are*? Wow. I've never been--" "Want to go to Philadelphia?" she said on impulse. "Too long-distance for running, but fine for a joyride." "Sure!" She caught herself just in time, before she let the pull take her--she was sure that from his point of view, with a reaction speed a fifth or less of hers, she'd simply vanish. With considerable effort, she forced herself to match his pace. He was even slower than she'd thought--she lost him once, in Philadelphia, found him morosely searching through public directories. "I can't get the hang of moving, I just can't make it work properly. How do you do it?" A little questioning suggested to her that there were glitches in both hardware and headware. The hardware one was relatively easy to diagnose, with a little discussion of chips. He looked at her diagram unhappily. "That'll take me weeks to fix, or more nuyen than I'm going to see all semester. I need *money*, Seeker. But...I tried to run the class-records machine, and I got *caught*. How do you get started? You need money to be good on the Matrix, you need to be good on the Matrix to get money--it's just impossible!" "Tricks," said Caroline gently. "If you can't run a system straight off--and even a good decker can't always, there's some really tough stuff out there--you look for ways to cheat. Keep your eyes open all the time you're up here. You never know what you'll find. Let me show you something." She took him to Ares/Philadelphia, and they watched the moons orbiting the crimson world below. "How do they do that?" she said softly. "I don't know, but I plan to find out. Think about what that architecture implies....Understand that, and you might well have the key to a lot of other things. If nothing else, all the Ares machines use the same system." "Wow," he said, in a voice of mixed awe and dismay. "Could *you* run that?" "I don't know. I plan to be very well prepared before I even think of trying. Fork, you need to get that hardware straightened out, and you need some time and practice to get your Matrix image set." "It takes so long, it's so hard....I go to all these classes, and it's nothing like this, they don't talk about anything important there. *This* is where it's at, Seeker. I'm *here*, I ought to be able to do something!" She sighed aloud. "Let's go back to Seattle." She tried to explain how she'd gotten started, the time it took to become expert on the Matrix, never mind hardware and software. He didn't want to believe her. "Look at Osiris!" she said impatiently. "How long do you think it took me to do this? Six months, easy, and another year debugging it. And this is superficial. Scratch the surface--" she demonstrated "--and you can still see the damn Egyptian tomb. Imagine trying to work in an Egyptian tomb all the time. Pretty bad." "How do I know you aren't pulling my leg?" Forked Lightning said sulkily. "How do I know you really worked on this at all?" While he spoke, she reached out to the system, familiar as her own apartment, shifted it slightly. "Do you know the system map?" "Of course!" "Where are we, and what does it connect to?" He rattled off the connections--correctly, she noted with some satisfaction, he wasn't *completely* hopeless. "All right," she said. "And if we walk through here--" A new passageway, directly behind him. "Where are we now?" "In CAD/CAM," he said at once, then stopped short, stared behind him. There was no access, Caroline having let it relapse to ground state. "*Oh*," he said. "You really are, you really did make all this. And you're talking to me!" Caroline grinned. "Why not? "And--" For the first time there was a flicker of expression in the clumsy Matrix image: wide metal-grilled eyes. "From Philadelphia. You're this fast, this slick, *from Philadelphia*. You're an AI, aren't you?" Fascination and fear. Taken aback, Caroline stared at him for a moment, managed to collect her wits. "No. No, I'm not. I'm just using some tricks, that's all.--You're the second person today who's asked me that. It's really weird." With sudden intensity: "Fork, if you go around bragging that you've met me, you're likely to cause me a lot of trouble--I'm not supposed to be here--and you run a real risk of causing *yourself* more trouble than you can imagine. Please don't do it." "Of course not!" Caught somewhere between dismay at his puppyish innocence and yearning for company, any company, she said gruffly, "I have some work to finish up. Tell you what. You work on getting that hardware glitch straightened out, and I'll have a look around, see what I can find that might look like a job for you." I won't steal money for you, pup. That's up to you, do or not. But you sure as hell do need some help. "You will? Thanks!" Unable to resist the chance to startle him once more, she turned away with a smile, took a single step--into the pull of Anubis, the dizzying speed of the cross-continental net. Found herself on a barren moon of a desolate planet, so close to home...so unbridgeably far. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 38824 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!stanford.edu!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 48 Message-ID: <1991May17.054520.26672@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 17 May 91 05:45:20 GMT Sender: root@agate.berkeley.edu (Charlie Root) Organization: /etc/organization Lines: 156 [Please reply to mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu, not this account.] 48. Intruder *Intruder Alert at SAN 1.* Jayhawk looked up from her programming, called up the best approximation of overwatch she could manage. SAN 1 was empty, the heavy silver bridge sparkling with the protective code she and Piebald had constructed. She swore, checked the surrounding nodes one by one. Nothing. Nothing. Wait! In the third arm of the complex, nowhere near the SAN--a flicker of movement, almost invisibly fast. There was something inside her machine. Abandoning the half-completed code, she teleported to the CPU, put all its adjacent nodes on internal alert. The drain on system resources was just perceptible. Methodically, she began calling up guardian daemons, filling the nodes of the third arm with them. She couldn't find the intruder again, but there was practically no internal IC on the system yet--the SANs had been the first priority--Damn! Where was it? She had a sudden prickling feeling that she was being watched. She whirled, found Piebald looking at her in puzzlement. "What's going on, Jayhawk?" "Intruder in complex 3. I can't pin it down. Want to go have a look?" She didn't entirely trust Piebald. It would be interesting to see how he dealt with whatever was out there. "No," he said apologetically. "I might get hurt." "How? You're practically nonexistant already." The system still refused to acknowledge his presence; so, apparently, had the IC guarding the CPU--either that, or he could teleport without her noticing. She hoped that was impossible. "How did you get in here, anyway?" "I--" he said, and vanished suddenly. She looked around in puzzlement, scanned the nodes for him--she didn't see him, but she wasn't entirely sure she *could* without being in the same node. Uncomfortably, she thought about someone outside cutting off links. Piebald had vanished in much the way a crashed decker might. Who could crash people off the Overnet, and what might such an attacker do next? The back of her neck prickled once more; she turned again, spinning gracefully on the spiderweb strand she was dangling from, and found Piebald staring at her. "What happened?" "What?" "You vanished. Where'd you go?" "I don't remember vanishing. When did this happen?" She sighed in exasperation. "Just now. What's the last thing you remember? Did you teleport? *Can* you teleport?" Idly, she reached out, tried to send him to one of the workstation nodes in complex one. To her surprise, she was able to catch him up, reform him in the distant node as effortlessly as if he had been Caroline. She teleported him back, intrigued. "What did you *do*?" he said in bewilderment, turning round and round. "Teleportation. Did you like it?" "I'm not sure. Why did you do it?" She'd never run analysis code against Piebald; if the system didn't see him, would her code do any better? But now, encouraged by her success, she called up stored routines from her days as a decker, probed at him. He squirmed uncomfortably. "What are you doing, Jayhawk?" "Looking at you," she said sweetly. A Persona, just like a decker. *Much* too much like a decker.--And his bells didn't jingle. Visually everything was perfect, but Piebald had never been so quiet. She primed the largest guardian daemon she could manage, set it to materialize just behind him and attack. In the instant of its materialization, too quickly for her to react, he leaped upwards, *through* the spun-glass ceiling of the CPU, and vanished. The daemon stood quiescent, wings folded behind it like a silver statue, without a target. Behind her, Piebald said, "What's going on, Jayhawk?" She whirled, reaching out to teleport him right off the edge of one of the SAN-bridges--she wasn't sure she could do that, but she intended to try. And met nothing. She could see him, but like the rest of the system, the CPU capacities that let her teleport denied his existance. "Someone's masquerading as you." "Oh dear," he said unhappily. "Wait! What if this isn't me?" His narrow face was comically concerned. "Don't worry about it, I can tell the difference." She caught herself before explaining how. The intruder might be listening. They waited in the CPU for half an hour by the system clock, but there was no further sign of the intruder. Jayhawk consoled herself with the thought that her daemon had frightened him off. She had an uneasy feeling that *she* wouldn't do well, pitted against one of those. At last she stepped the system down to normal security levels, went back to her code--and picked through it carefully, looking for boobytraps. It had been left half-finished, easy to modify, none of the checking procedures of active IC. She found the foreign subroutine about halfway through, embedded in the code controlling the visual representation of the IC. It seemed to be simple graphics code, unlinked to anything else. She isolated it, transfered it to one of the test-site nodes in complex three, set it off. As she and Piebald watched (he had followed her from the CPU with no difficulty, the guardian daemons as oblivious to him as the rest) the node was flooded with blinding white light, a thundering explosion, and then words etched into a fading cloud of smoke. They said "Boom! You're dead." Jayhawk leaned on the railing and snarled. Lefty. Lefty had been *in her system* and she hadn't caught him. Though (a minor comfort) at least she'd spotted him, hadn't fallen for his trick....At least, not the obvious trick. She searched the whole system, node by node, visiting each one personally. The last one she checked was the "Gate chamber", deep beneath the CPU, empty and unused. The entire node was covered with a fine grey dust, sifting into the patterns of the pentagram, the monitor panels. Analysis told her that it was a construct, but not normal code. Nothing more. I need Caroline. Damn it, I *need* Caroline! Where is she? Jayhawk retreated from the node, careful to insure that no dust clung to her, and set the largest daemon she could create to guarding the accesses. She couldn't think what else to do. Analysis, perception....those were Caroline's gifts, not hers, not beyond what the simple Matrix code gave her. And this dust was probably...was probably magic. Lefty had been a mage. Intuition suggested that magic, too, was Caroline's talent and not hers. For herself she didn't care. The hot craving that had led her to try to bargain with the Spider was gone, drowned in the delight and utter surety of her attunement to the system. But the weakness in her defenses terrified her. She went back to her coding, turning another project over and over in her mind, something to begin when this one was complete. Barrier IC to block impossible accesses, ways of entering a node that didn't exist. Such IC didn't exist either, of course. But if it could be done without magic, she was going to write some. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 39700 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!asuvax!ukma!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!cis.ohio-state.edu!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!linac!att!pacbell.com!ames!sun-barr!newstop!sun!amdcad!cdr From: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 49 Message-ID: <1991May28.180905.19542@amd.com> Date: 28 May 91 18:09:05 GMT Sender: cdr@amd.com (Carl Rigney) Organization: Montaigne Paradisio Lines: 140 [I'm posting this for Mary since she was having Matrix problems.] 49. Conquest Jayhawk and Piebald were engaged in cleaning up the results of their latest attempt at defending the system from 'impossible' intruders; it had shattered all over the node they tested it in, filling every system process in reach with bits of meaningless code. "Not one of your more inspired ideas," said Jayhawk, trying to reconstruct a monitor table. "I'm afraid not," said Piebald with a mournful jingle. "Next time--" *System alert: Intruder at Gate chamber* Jayhawk let out a yell and flung herself into the CPU, reaching out to see what was happening. The Gate chamber was empty. She put the node between it and the CPU into full alert, awakening its daemon, and scrabbled for vision. A huge yellow-white sphere, swirling clouds obscuring its interior, was pressing itself against the IC she and Piebald had installed. The security daemon was flinging itself at the intruder, at it and *through* it harmlessly, as if it were no more than an illusion. But the intruder bounced back off the IC, obviously balked. For an instant it had looked almost insubstantial, as if it were trying to dissolve into the barrier. Jayhawk bit her lip, fed more power into the IC. The sphere tried once more to break through, then backed off, seemed to consider for an instant. Vaguely within the clouds she could make out a small, curled shape. With startling speed, the sphere retreated into the Gate chamber. Jayhawk felt a wrenching at her control, a shift in the system's operations--*It's forcing the node into CPU emulation!* She struggled to block it, found herself opposed by raw force greater than her own, without her fine control but--*It's teleporting!* She snatched up the lightblade from her belt. The sphere appeared in the CPU, barely fitting between the silver-black webstrands. Before she could react it wrenched at her again, trying to pull part of the system from her control. She leaped toward it, bounced off a suddenly-appearing wall--not Barrier, but something that looked like a continuation of the CPU's outer wall, partitioning it into two independent nodes. Arrays of indicators went dead around her, half the CPU and all of sector 1 blocked off from her access. With a scream of fury, she drove her blade into the wall, expecting that nothing would happen--the system was proof against such attacks, if this were really a main node boundary. To her surprise it shattered, fragments of black glass and broken cable showering down around her. The glowing sphere was resting against one of the main control panels, fine lines of yellow light probing into it. Jayhawk struck at it, trying to disrupt its actions. Her blade skittered across its surface, not quite digging in--not ordinary decker code, something she hadn't seen before, but not Aliantha's invulnerability, or if so she had new resources against it, if she could only reach them-- Caught off guard, she realized its intentions only too late, when it seized her, threw her cross-system in the dizzying fragmentation of teleport. She found herself in SAN 2, blade still in hand, a daemon querying her. She destroyed the daemon with an angry flick of her will, tried to teleport back. Blocked. It was not in control of the system; but from the CPU it did have power to interfere with her access. The one weakness, as she'd always known. She ran, instead, node to node. At the security node which controlled access to the CPU another daemon challenged her and was instantly dismissed. But the IC was not so easy to deal with. She'd left no back doors in it, no simple way for her to pass through; it hadn't seemed necessary, when she had both teleport and the complete control which could cancel the IC at will. She tried that, now, found herself blocked. It was good IC, this creation of hers and Piebald's (where is he, anyway?)--it was not going to allow itself to be dispelled without a struggle. Precious seconds wasted while she tore apart the code--easier than trying to pass through it, she'd crafted it too well. She could feel the intruder doing *something*, something that drew heavily on the system's resources. A brief flicker, as it reached for power--No! She fought it back, choking its access--not to the system itself, she was in no position to do that, but to the vaguely-sensed roots of its power. Those were hers. The system slowed painfully, laboring under the demands. With a sudden snap, the intruder relented, shifted its attention elsewhere. [Reading through case studies of mind-control victims, Caroline felt a sudden, frightening vertigo; for a moment she thought she might faint. *Something's happening at Anubis!* She abandoned the project, went racing out into the datastream, heading for Ares and her link with her system.] The intruder made another attempt to assert control; Jayhawk felt it as a cold insinuation into the back of her mind, between herself and the part of her that was the system. Snarling, she burst into the CPU, shaking off an attempt to teleport her away--she knew that trick now, it wouldn't work again. [A second bout of dizziness, so that for an instant Caroline hung in the telecom grid, too disoriented to move. She shook herself out of it with panicky haste, let herself fall into the SAN node at Ares. The gift Martha had given her, the little metal dart that would supposedly let her return to Anubis, was in a pouch at her belt. She hadn't wanted to use it, afraid of Martha's motives, but something was clearly very wrong at Anubis--she had no choice. She strapped the dart to her wrist, readied herself to activate it.] At such close quarters, the swirling clouds within the sphere didn't quite conceal the creature at its center; a tiny, wizened caricature of a human, like a distorted fetus. It did not react visibly to her attempts to crack its shell. Its eyes, narrow slits in the inhuman face, were tightly closed. She hacked into its links with the system, rained sparks off the shell itself--the creature was vulnerable, she could sense that, and if she could just find a weakness-- An instant of terrible shock, disorientation, as golden tendrils probed into the black and silver of the system, into *her*, asserted control. And, hard on the heels of the probe, a wash of information, sensation, pouring down her link with Caroline--a link suddenly expanded to a wide datastream. She could feel what Caroline was experiencing, taste the flavor of her thoughts-- And the lies that the sphere was imposing on Caroline echoed in the back of her mind, though there was no lie, no delusion that could deny her oneness with the system. She struck out at the sphere, again and again, trying to cut the luminous strands of gold reaching out into the CPU, imposing the intruder's will on it. At last she realized that she might as well be attacking the system itself; the intruder was drawing strength from it, anchoring itself in the matchless power of her machine. *I didn't even know that was possible.* -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 39699 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!asuvax!ncar!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!cis.ohio-state.edu!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!linac!att!pacbell.com!ames!sun-barr!newstop!sun!amdcad!cdr From: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 50 Message-ID: <1991May28.181210.19693@amd.com> Date: 28 May 91 18:12:10 GMT Sender: cdr@amd.com (Carl Rigney) Organization: Montaigne Paradisio Lines: 182 [I'm posting this for Mary since she was having Matrix problems.] 50. Angela Caroline tied the dart to her wrist, readied herself to activate it-- A soft chime sounded, and a sourceless female voice said: "Angela Whitechapel--simulation ended." The Ares node blurred, flickered away into the featureless white interior of an egg-shaped shell. Now the top of the egg was peeling away, a woman's face peering in. "Are you all right?" Angela tried to move, found herself constrained by the induction rig. "Easy!" said the woman. "Let me give you a hand." She peeled off the forehead contacts (taking a few stray strands of hair with them), released the safety belt. "You might be a bit disoriented for a few minutes, that's normal." Strong arms helped Angela lever herself out of the egg. "Let me get you a cup of water, and you can sit down for a minute until you adjust." Angela sank down on the padded bench, rested her head on the back, eyes closed. God, that was so vivid! The long-run stims really were worth the extra money for isometrics and lifesupport--she'd never felt *anything* so vivid--"Hey! It doesn't end there, does it?" The attendant checked a panel, said apologetically, "I'm afraid so. It says 'watch out for part IV coming next month.'" And, with false cheeriness, "You'd reached your credit limit anyway, so perhaps it's just as well." Angela's cheeks burned. Her *father's* cred limit, more like. He didn't approve of stim, the old fogie. Well, by next month she'd have saved up enough for the next installment, whether he liked it or not; even if it meant taking an evening job on top of her classes. Aloud, but without resonance--as if it were speaking directly within her ears--a voice said to her, "Jayhawk, get a grip on yourself! You're letting them catch you in their illusions. Please, help me break you out of it." Her own voice. She shrank back against the bench, fighting the impulse to put her hands over her ears. If the nurse saw her freaking out like this, she'd be blacklisted so fast....and then she'd never get to see the end of the story. And Papa would be horrified. No. No. With an effort she composed herself. Just a little carryover from the stim; she'd never done a four-day run before, and everyone said it was a little disorienting at first. She took a deep breath, nodded sweetly to the nurse, and made her way out into the wavering sunlight of Seattle in April. She'd planned to spend the afternoon picking out textbooks for next quarter--still a good plan. She could do it at home. Her dinner date with Mark wasn't till four. Back in her apartment, she called up lists on her terminal. Principles of Business had a remarkably long list of recommended books, most of which looked as though they would choke a digitizer, let alone a human reader. Wincing, she picked out three of the shorter ones, charged the copy fees to her credstick--no limit there, oh no! Papa *approved* of books. The list for Introductory Matrix Programming, the class she was really looking forward to, was much shorter. She scrolled through titles, trying to decide. I've read all these books already. She shook her head, trying to clear her mind of the odd idea. It wasn't true--she'd read a few pop-sci books on the Matrix, but that was it. Stray background from the Jayhawk stim, that's what it was. Jayhawk had been set up as some kind of great genius on the Matrix, though probably it was all hokum, like the science in any other stim. Only...it had felt so *real*, so utterly convincing. Could that really be what running the Matrix was like? She had no idea. Not even a datajack link, Papa didn't approve--when you graduate, he'd said, then we'll talk about it. She didn't plan to wait for his say-so. Once she graduated, she'd bloody well pay for the surgery herself. Jayhawk had embezzled her college fund money to pay for cyberware, worked her way through college by herself. For a moment Angela contemplated that, then pushed it aside. She just wasn't that gutsy, and besides she'd probably get caught instantly, and how would she explain to Papa? But she *could* get an evening job, tutoring or something like that. To pay for the next installment of the stim, if no more--Angela, you're turning into a junkie, she reproved herself. She picked out three textbooks, including a playful-sounding one relating the Matrix to game theory, downloaded her collection to a reader screen and went off to lie down. Rest, that's what she needed. She really couldn't face Mark like this. She couldn't concentrate on browsing the textbooks--the business texts were even more boring than expected, and the Matrix texts simply fed her daydreams. She leafed through technical material idly, trying to prove the stim wrong in some of its less fantastic details--the Overnet stuff was obviously hokum, but what about the actual Matrix runs? Rather to her surprise, she didn't find anything demonstrably false. They must have had a good science editor on that one, or a real Matrix runner. So lovely....she'd never seen anything as beautiful as Anubis. She remembered ads for the stim series: "Weaave your own life into the story." They'd gotten her number, all right. Left her longing for something that had never existed, pining for the Matrix as if she were a real addict, like Jayhawk....She remembered the inward voice, and wild conspiracy theories flashed through her mind--subliminally addictive stims, sinister mental programming. She snorted. Right out of this week's worst vids. Georgie's was a perfectly respectable establishment (for a stim parlor, anyway), not the scene of vast dark plots. She was letting Jayhawk's paranoia get to her. A trickle of pain threaded its way down between her eyes, bringing with it a flickering at the edge of vision, like a fluorescent light set on the wrong frequency. She rubbed at her eyes, wincing. Were the room lights on the blink again? This was such a cheap place, she really ought to look for a new apartment. She turned the light off, pulled the curtains open--winced even more painfully. The *sunlight* was flickering like a bad fluoro, more noticably now, almost as if she could see something else through it. She dropped the curtains, went hastily into the bathroom to run cold water on a washcloth, hold it to her eyes. It didn't help. The darkness flickered too, sickly grey flashes that stabbed at the back of her eyes. A cold knot twisted at the pit of her stomach. The stim had screwed up her vision somehow, some kind of bad reaction. Admit to that and she'd *never* get her cyberware, never see the Matrix. No, no, she was overreacting. Just a little trouble adjusting; she'd never done a four-day run before, and it was clearly a little harder on her body than she'd expected. *But you ought to have a checkup just to be sure.* Like so many of her wiser thoughts, she hardly recognized that one as hers. But it was a good idea. She called up the University Health Clinic, found that they wouldn't see her until tomorrow morning unless she claimed it was an emergency. Papa would *certainly* hear about that. She made an appointment for eight am the next day, hung up feeling that she'd done her duty by prudence. Her own voice spoke to her, soundless now but utterly distinct. *I can stop the flickering, if you'll just agree to listen to me. I know it's hard for you to believe me, but just listen, that's all I ask.* A second's pause. *Listening is the first step to madness.* "No!" she said aloud, then caught herself, pressed her palms hard into her eyes. God, she really was having a bad reaction. Calm down, Angela. *Lie* down, why don't you? The flickering had stopped. She lay down, ran through the calming routines from her tai chi class of the previous semester. It was hard to relax, keyed up as she was; hard to ignore the fake memories--Channa taught me this, didn't she? I/Jayhawk used it to try to break the Paradisian's mind block. But eventually it seemed to help. At least the flickering didn't reappear. *Did I listen? Am I going crazy?* She actually managed to doze, on and off, for half an hour. When she woke the weird hallucinations seemed distant and dim--still worrisome, but not nearly so pressing. She'd shower now, so her hair would be dry by the time Mark arrived. She undressed, stood for a moment caught by her reflection in the mirror on the bathroom door. Cascades of black hair--she still wasn't quite used to that, it'd been brown most of her life--skin a little pale from too much stim and too little sun, but not bad, overall. Blue eyes, though not the crystalline silver-blue she 'remembered'. The stim had woven her own face and body into the delusion, so it almost seemed as if she saw Jayhawk looking out at her, an expression on her face that might be pity. "If only it could be true," she whispered to the image. At that moment, she would have traded everything she had for the stim to be reality, her own dull life the dream. *But that's just not the way it is.* She shook herself out of the daydream, went in to shower. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 39952 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!spool.mu.edu!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 51 Message-ID: <1991May31.150722.25432@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 31 May 91 15:07:22 GMT Sender: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 243 [Please reply to mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu, not this account.] 51. Collapse Jayhawk swore and dropped her attempts to deflect the stimsense channel. It was clearly giving Caroline a headache--it was giving *her* a headache, by feedback across the link between them--and it wasn't jarring her loose from the damned illusion. She could speak to Caroline as she pleased, slipping her words into the channel--the intruder was nothing like fast enough to stop her, though she had tried--but the intruder could play at that game too. "Listening is the first step to madness." She snarled aloud. She could see easily enough what a control struggle between herself and the fetus-sphere would do to Caroline. What she needed was to break the stimsense link altogether. It was being handled by sector 1; she'd broken in through the IC, traced the channel through datastores full for the first time in their existance, subprocessors humming with activity. She was unwillingly impressed by the sophistication of the programming, able to impose not only false sensory information but false memories, history, identity as well. It gave her new respect for her system's capabilities. If only they were at *her* disposal.... When she first found herself baffled, the intruder's links embedded too deep into her system to attack, she'd called Piebald and been quite pleased when he appeared at once. ("Where were you?" "I have no idea.") But he'd had no insight to offer; his approach to dealing with the intruder was to fling himself onto the glowing sphere, slide down with a screeching of fingernails. He commented mournfully on the high quality of the stimsense, but had no more idea than she how to counteract it. Less idea. She had managed to interfere with the signal, reroute portions of it through the system until they were slightly out of synch. She'd hoped that the resulting imperfections in the illusion would give Caroline the hint she needed to break out of it. No such luck. She was almost trembling with anger, mainly at the intruder, but also at Caroline for letting herself be fooled. A thought struck her. "Can you use attack code?" she asked Piebald. He only looked puzzled. "Here." A copy of her own lightblade, ornate hilt--when had it gotten that ornate?--binding a tongue of icy blue light. Piebald accepted it, waved it about tentatively. It didn't go out at his touch, as she'd rather expected. Reflexively she tried to teleport him away, but to her relief she failed. So he wasn't an imposter--unless her enemies had gotten much more clever. "Attack the fetus, distract her. I want to try something." Piebald nodded earnestly, and they went to the CPU together. The Barrier IC was up again across the opening leading into the CPU, cascades of silver-blue fire and water frozen in an endless fall. Jayhawk swore. It was good IC, as she'd verified when she hacked through it the first time. Piebald glanced at her in puzzlement, reached with long angular fingers into the lightshimmer of the IC, pulled out a single strand. The whole cascade unravelled into a rain of glittering fragments, splashing down onto the webwork strand and falling into the darkness below to vanish like fireflies. "Oh!" said Jayhawk, somewhat surprised. Piebald had helped design the IC, but she'd thought she'd checked his work thoroughly for back doors of that sort. Apparently not. Well, she could worry about that later. She stepped across the threshhold, tensed herself for the attack-- The hilt of the second lightblade clattered to the ground as Piebald vanished. Jayhawk swore, uncreated the program, retreated from the CPU. There was Piebald, staring at her in puzzlement. "What happened?" A little experimentation revealed that he couldn't enter the CPU; he vanished instantly each time. As far as Jayhawk could tell he wasn't being teleported--at least not by the resources of her system, which had never admitted his existance anyway. The intruder had changed the interior of the CPU to resemble an Angela's-eye view of the world. It was intensely aggrevating to look at. But even in the other nodes, there was no escaping the background murmur of Angela's thoughts, her infuriating string of denials. Angela was off on a date with Mark now, trying to sweet-talk him into spending his copious resources on cyberware for her. Jayhawk rather approved--at least the little bimbo had *some* ambition--but it made trying to talk to her very unpromising. She'd wait for a better opportunity; perhaps tonight, when Angela went home to sleep. The idea of Caroline *asleep*, open to whatever influences the fetus might produce, was deeply disturbing. Better to try something, anything, before then. ** "Your dad's a complete barbarian," Mark said. "I really don't see why you should let him ruin your career this way." "I've been thinking of getting a job," Angela confessed, "if only I could find something that wasn't too deadly dull." "Yeah. Hey, I have a friend in one of Dad's subsidiary companies who's looking for someone to work with him on chip design. Pretty clerical, a lot of it, but it still beats most of the stuff you might be doing--" with your experience, she thought bitterly, and your lack of connections "--and it might be an in to something pretty good." "That sounds wonderful! Could you possibly introduce us?" "No problem. Um, excuse me a sec?" He put his napkin carefully on the table, headed for the back of the restaraunt. She'd decided some time ago that these rather dramatic disappearances weren't caused by the need to make secret phone calls or pick up mysterious packages, but by an ingrained reluctance to mention the word 'bathroom'. Chip design. Sure, I could do that. I've done it before.--She checked herself. Jayhawk had....Jayhawk seemed to be able to do anything convenient for the plot. She'd read a few books, herself, but that was it. She sipped at her tea. You're being a fool, Angela, and you know it--mooning over a stim-drama like this. If you really want to run the Matrix, *do* something about it. But...was it going to be a disappointment? Could real life measure up to her daydream's, Jayhawk's reality? The Matrix-running had been intensely sweet, but by far the best part, the most compelling, was pure fantasy. The creation of Anubis. How had they programmed that, how had they made her believe that *she* was creating it? Node by node, shaping each one out of her deepest desires...god, it had been so beautiful.... Like crystal raindrops falling, words came into her mind: in the voice of her own thoughts, but somehow, indefinably, not hers. *Created by you; no one else could have done it, no one else knows that beauty. And it is incomplete without you, as you are without it.* A voice of passionate desire. And the same voice, but colder--almost the tone her own most chiding thoughts might take, but not quite--*I really ought to see a doctor.* Angela moaned, clenching her hands tightly around the warmth of her tea. Incomplete. That was it, that was how she felt....how they'd made her feel, somehow. Empty and desolate and *aching* for something that had never been real. "Are you okay?" She collected herself hastily, put on some kind of smile for Mark's benefit. "Sure. Just daydreaming--or I guess it's a day-nightmare where Papa's concerned." -- Jayhawk sat on a latticework walkway in sector 1, watching the system spin its illusions, and tried to think. The fetus was too well ensconced in the CPU for Jayhawk to force her out, too tightly linked into the system's power for an attack to succeed. Jayhawk suspected that if she could convince Caroline to cooperate, the two of them could shatter the illusion, but she wasn't making much progress there. She tried choking the fetus' access to the system's power source down to a trickle. Everything slowed down, Angela included; the system labored around her like an overstressed timeshare process, response time spiralling up and up. But it didn't seem to cause the fetus any particular difficulties, and it was intensely uncomfortable for Jayhawk herself. She had even, after much consideration, sent a message to Martha via the drone that Martha had left her. A short sharp message. "A fetus inside a yellow sphere has taken over partial control of my CPU. I know there's probably nothing you can do, but I would appreciate any advice. It's going to drive Caroline completely insane. I didn't think that was what you wanted. Jayhawk." So far there'd been no response. She regretted letting the drone go; she'd been itching to take it apart, figure out its workings, duplicate it. "Piebald, any idea why she wouldn't want you in the CPU?" Piebald shook his head, jingling softly. "Are you sure that's a she? It looks like an it to me." She'd decided arbitrarily, somewhere in the middle of a stream of curses. "There must be something you can do that she doesn't like. Hm. I wonder." She looked hard at him, reached out to try the teleport, was reassuringly ineffective. "Piebald." She tried to catch his eyes, found that between the sharpness of his face and his tendancy to look at her sideways, birdlike, she could never see more than one eye at a time. She settled for the blue one. "Are you really mine?" "I think so," he said in a soft baffled voice. "As far as I know." "That's not exactly what I meant. Suppose you could choose, you had to decide whether or not. What would you say then?" "Choose?" he said in wonder. "What a concept. Yes, I still would." He seemed pleased, as if he'd made a discovery. "Give me your hand. I want to try something." He held out his hand at once, long thin fingers spread out. She took it, concentrating. *I have power that comes to me through my system. I also have power that is mine simply because I am Jayhawk.* She reached out, tried to link Piebald to that power, let him share her existence independent of the system. -- Martha was sitting in her workshop node, pondering her reply to the message lying on the table before her. It was hard not to respond with anger or pain to the bitterness in it, even harder to explain how limited her ability to help Jayhawk was. Framed in the window above her desk, Jayhawk's system rotated slowly on its axis, a jewelled satellite to the larger, drabber complex below it. A flicker of movement caught her eye; she looked up, froze. The rotation was accelerating; as she watched, helpless, the link between the system and Ares snapped, end flailing like a live wire. Paradoxically, against the increasing centrifugal force, the system began to draw inward, nodes compressing, coalescing from the outside toward the black and silver egg of the CPU. Lights flared, went dark. Still the spinning increased and increased until she could see nothing but blur, a black-and-silver point flickering with power. She crumpled the half-composed message between her hands. For better or worse, it was too late now. She hoped Jayhawk would forgive her. -- Explosion and implosion, as if in an instant her awareness expanded to encompass the whole system, a brief flicker of the lost overwatch, and at the same time the system collapsed inward on itself, on her. Darkness reached out for her, a somehow familiar darkness, promising comfort, healing, an end to strife. Jayhawk fought it, reaching out desperately for the system, for Caroline. *No! I won't die, not now, not when I have so much!* She was falling, a fall that would have no end, she'd touched the fringes of this when Caroline was dying and now it was happening to her-- Something strong and sure caught her, pulled her back from the embrace of darkness, into a system gone mad. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 39953 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 52 Message-ID: <1991May31.150857.25685@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 31 May 91 15:08:57 GMT Sender: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 151 [Please reply to mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu, not this account.] 52. Stasis Angela was squirming through an interminable performance of "Fiddler on the Roof"--Tevye's resemblance to her father had seemed amusing for a few minutes, but now it was merely infuriating--when with a sudden, soundless flicker everything around her changed. She was standing on a delicate stairway, curving up toward a narrow gate between two silver towers. Beneath her, black water reflected the stairway's latticework with unrippling clarity. SAN 3 of Anubis. She climbed the stairs slowly, walked through the gateway. The system was spread out around her, just as she remembered it--but frozen, utterly motionless. The lightplay along the fiberoptic cables was stopped in place, individual pulses visible as beads along a glowing thread. The telecommunications nexus, which should have been a turning, everchanging mobile, was caught in an ungainly position, unbalanced in the course of shifting from one configuration to another. She touched it; it was cold and hard as steel. *I'm having a seizure.* She tried to will herself out of the delusion, back into contact with the real world, to no avail. She imagined Mark's panic, the show interrupted by the sudden influx of medics, phone calls to her parents. *God help me.* Not a prayer, only a reflexive reaction to her terror. It was unbearably silent. She couldn't stay in one place, driven to hear something if only the brush of her own footsteps on metal and glass. None of the reflective surfaces reflected her, but looking down at herself she could see that her clothes hadn't changed. No Matrix image, this. She'd imagined being in Anubis, wanted it desperately, but this.... Maybe she wasn't just having a seizure. Maybe she was crazy. In one of the containment laboratories she found a huge sphere of glowing yellow-white, a dark shape within made indistinct by swirls of frozen cloud. She reached out to touch it, wondering--it wasn't part of her stim-drama memories of Anubis--but her hand went right through. A hologram, three-dimensional but intangible. She climbed up to a watchtower node to look out across the system. It was uncanny how she knew every twist and turn of the deceptive nodes... frightening, to see everything in stasis, as if time had stopped. She vaguely remembered reading about seizures which extended a second's memory for hours or days. The stimsense parlor was going to get sued within an inch of its life, that was for sure. If she ever recovered enough to indict them. The view from the watchtowers seemed normal, except for the lack of movement. She remembered, however, that the views shown were supplied by a system process, not true perspective on what was shown. If the system had stopped-- *Mustn't get too involved in the delusion, or I'll never get out.* On the spiderstrand leading from watchtower to CPU, she found an image of--herself, she thought for an instant. No. Jayhawk, dressed in the silver and electric blue of her Matrix image, black hair shining in the light of the system--it didn't even glitter, impossibly motionless. A hologram, like the sphere. She glanced away for a moment, looking for activity towards the CPU. When she looked back the image had vanished. She/Caroline had never been in the CPU for more than an instant since its awakening. She hesitated at the threshhold, stepped forward defiantly. *Delusion.* For an instant she saw a moving tableau, the first movement other than her own she'd seen: the yellow sphere, clouds roiling within it, sliding toward one of the other exits, a jester in multi-colored clothing pointing at it, Jayhawk--two Jayhawks--one looking toward her, the other doing something at a panel. The sphere vanished, and everything else froze. She walked forward, touched the nearer Jayhawk. Nothing tangible, only a faint cool tingle. *I'm in Anubis CPU!* She shook her head violently. This wasn't real, there was no way it could be real....god, if only....Stop that, Angela! Mustn't get caught up in the delusion. The gravity was dizzyingly low in this node. She climbed up a gossamer strand of light and glass, settled herself in a webwork hammock near the main controls. One of the Jayhawk images had moved, she noticed; it was by the entrance now, pointing toward it. She turned away from the meaningless dumb show with a shiver, looked at the system monitors. She could read them, or imagined she could; but they told her very little. They'd never been designed for stasis--most of the information was encoded in the ebb and flow of the patterns, not their literal meaning. The system was in alert status, a number of nodes at highest security: the Gate chamber, all three SANs, the CPU itself. Other than that, nothing seemed unusual. She turned away from that, too, curled up in the hammock with her arms wrapped around her head. Perhaps I could go to sleep, and when I wake up I'll be all right. She tried to concentrate on a calming exercise. Voices, suddenly, from below. "Nobody move! If we--" Silence. It had been her own voice. No. Don't listen. Again, a minute or so later: "Aha! Piebald, what's going on? I've figured it out--if there's an odd number of us we can talk, but an even number puts us into this messy timeshare mode." She peeked out through her arms, unable to help herself. Jayhawk was sitting on a web-strand, talking to the jester--she recognized him now, he had looked into Jayhawk's prison room in Paradisio and said "Try Tshimshian!" With a jingle, he said, "I have no idea. Everything's stopped. I saw the yellow sphere in here for a minute, and--Hey! Who's that?" "Angela," said Jayhawk in a rather hostile tone. "Probably some kind of Paradisian trick. Piebald, could you try to find Caroline and send her in here? I'm almost positive I saw her a little while ago. No. Hang on a second. Everything will go into freeze-frame if you leave." Angela felt the web-strands shiver at Jayhawk's movement, curled herself up tighter. Her own voice, though more sure, more confidant: "Angela? Is that who you are?" "Go away," she whispered. "I mustn't talk to you." "Why not?" "If I pay attention to the delusion, I'll get permanently trapped." She rolled over further, her back to Jayhawk. *Mustn't talk to her!* "Ah." Almost sympathy, but not quite. "I see. How did--" Silence. Unable to help herself, Angela looked up, found the Jayhawk- image frozen in place beside her. Below, the creature that said Tshimshian was staring fixedly at a second Jayhawk, who had apparently been caught in the act of entering the node. With a sudden twist in her belly, Angela realized that she was looking at Caroline. *But I was Caroline, I remember being...in the stim...how could this be real and I not be Caroline?* It was intolerable. What would Angela be doing in Anubis, how could she make sense of that? She didn't even have a datajack, she couldn't run the Matrix, let alone.... I want to go to sleep. I want this not to be happening. God, I'm scared. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 40439 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 53 Message-ID: <1991Jun5.210133.25806@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 5 Jun 91 21:01:33 GMT Sender: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 275 53. Persuasion Angela lay wrapped in the webbing, her arms across her face, trying not to listen to the discussions below; and failing. There'd been a quick, sharp exchange between two speakers who she couldn't distinguish by voice, though one--Jayhawk, she guessed--seemed a little more forceful, distinctly more angry. Territorial. She'd told the other--it must be Caroline, mustn't it?--about the invasion of Anubis by the yellow sphere, described Angela's whole life as a stimsense delusion. When she explained how she'd precipitated the current shutdown by touching Piebald--that must be the Tsimshian-thing-- Caroline questioned her fiercely. Why had Jayhawk trusted Piebald? What did she think Piebald was? What did she think had happened? "I want to talk to him," said Caroline at last, a distinct edge to her voice. "Why don't you go tell him to come in here?" She heard the same events recounted from Piebald's side, then said harshly "Why should we trust you? You come from Paradisio." "I don't know," said Piebald unhappily. "I'm not sure you should." Angela almost felt sorry for him--No, dammit! I'm listening to them again. Mustn't do that. The node went into freeze-frame suddenly, Caroline and Piebald turning into motionless images. She couldn't see any particular reason; Jayhawk hadn't returned. *Why are you expecting it to make sense? It's a delusion.* First Piebald, then Caroline vanished. In the sudden silence, Angela tried once more to go to sleep. Am I going to be able to live with myself, if I do wake up and have to face...being Angela, not Jayhawk? I have to. This is terrible. Piebald's voice from below, raised in indignant protest: "It was here! The yellow sphere thing was in here spying on us! I saw it!" Jayhawk's voice: "I saw Caroline. Are you sure?" "It wasn't really Caroline. It was the yellow thing. Spying on us!" A sickening thrill of hope which she couldn't banish. Not the real Caroline. *I* could be....She imagined their relief when they discovered the truth, the way they'd welcome her, so much sweeter than Jayhawk's callous questioning.... Silence again. She looked down, for a brief moment saw *two* Piebalds in the node, a startled image of Jayhawk staring at them. One vanished, and the other flickered into movement. His mouth was wide open. "That was me!" he said miserably. "No," said Jayhawk, a dangerous growl in her voice. "That was Lefty, I think. Damn. Pie, what's the last thing you remember?" She questioned the jester for several minutes, ventured a grudging "I think this is really you. We're going to have to watch out for that. Crash this timeshare business! I need to talk to everyone at once. Angela! Do you mind leaving the CPU for a bit? I need to talk to Caroline and Piebald at the same time." Rather against her will, Angela found herself shepherded out into one of the security/routing nodes ringing the CPU. Even frozen, it was painfully beautiful, massed datastores like layer upon layer of etched glass, illuminated from within to throw patterns like shards of meaning on the black-glass walls. She might have read that data if the machine were alive, but it was meaningless now. She reached out to it, trying to awaken it, but there was not even a flicker of response, no sense that she could do such a thing. Despondent, she walked slowly through the datastores, seeking the illusion of life her own movement gave the static patterns. An image of Jayhawk--perhaps it was Caroline, she couldn't tell-- appeared suddenly in the node. A moment later it had shifted, climbing up onto a ledge above the datastores, settling itself as if for a long wait. Angela stared at it. The image shifted again, pointing an arm at the webstrand leading to the CPU. She collected herself, climbed back up into the CPU. A Jayhawk--she was becoming completely confused--and Piebald were there, watching her. "Jayhawk says"--so it must be Caroline, mustn't it? or the imposter-- "that you're important, that we need to persuade you to help us." She couldn't treat them as unreal. She'd tried and tried, but she simply couldn't do it, couldn't block out the evidence of her senses, the beauty of Anubis, no matter how patently impossible it was. With a despairing cry, she flung herself down on a latticework platform, boucing in the negligable gravity. "Why should I help you?" she choked out. "What is there for me, if this is real? It's unbearable! Anubis should be mine, *I* made it--how can you ask me to help *you* take control of it? What am I doing here?" A sharp intake of breath from Caroline, a moment's pause. "I do understand," she said at last. "You should realize that. I had to give it up too, to Jayhawk, so that we could go on. "I don't know who or what you are, exactly. But if you're part of me, of us, then it's yours too. And if not--I give you my word, Angela, for what it's worth. I remember being you, I know you're worth this. If I ever have the power to do so, I will see to it that you get your own chance to create, to make something that is yours as Anubis is mine. I swear it." Like you promised to help Slim? Angela thought bitterly. She wanted to tear at Caroline with her fingernails, scream in frustration and desire. The promises were empty, empty, she wanted something *now*. "What do you want me to do? How can I possibly help you?" In a wail, "I don't even have a datajack, I can't run the Matrix, let alone the Overnet!" "By a Gate? Even physical things can be brought here, or close to here, by power like that of the High Priests." There was a shiver of pride in Caroline's voice that made Angela feel all the more inadequate. "Does that matter? The important thing is getting the system restarted." Caroline questioned Angela for some time about how she'd found herself in Anubis, how she perceived the system. The answers didn't seem to satisfy her. "Get Jayhawk," she said to Piebald at last. Angela stared at her in the brief freeze after Piebald's departure. Caroline was not exactly the self she saw in the mirror: her eyes were silver beneath the blue, her bearing subtly different. Confident. Angela turned away, dizzy with envy. Jayhawk entered the node, dangled from a high-flung support above them, hair flying. "Okay?" "Angela will talk to us," said Caroline, "so now what?" For several minutes they discussed options, not excluding her deliberately--but she found, to her dismay, that she couldn't follow the bulk of it. She remembered the technical data that had come up in the stim, with crystalline clarity. But she didn't remember the whole range of technical information that Jayhawk's education and career had given her. Because she wasn't Jayhawk. It was so clear. "Angela," said Jayhawk to her at last. "Do you really want to help us?" She wasn't at all sure, but she nodded. It seemed easiest. "Give me your hand." Jayhawk slid down the strand, unafraid of the substantial drop. "Caroline says she sees you as incomplete---a whole person, nothing missing, but tenuous. Unsupported." She tossed her head back, said formally, "What strength and surety I have, I will share with you, if you ask it." For a flickering instant the system was alive around them, a torrent of light pouring through the CPU's indicators, the visual music of Anubis' heart. It was gone before she could even gasp. She cried out in dismay, heard Jayhawk and Caroline echo her. "No, don't stop!" "Almost," said Jayhawk in intense frustration. "I felt it, I know what's wrong--the system's grossly overloaded, there's some process soaking up practically every CPU-cycle. But I don't know what to do about it." She let go of Angela's hand, leaving it tingling. They went into freeze-frame as Piebald entered the node. After a moment Caroline vanished. "What was that?" said Piebald in excitement. "Oreo," said Jayhawk instantly, and when Piebald replied "cookie" continued: "Angela and I did it, trying to cooperate in bringing the system up. Tried it with Caroline earlier, but there's nothing--unless we merge, and the reasons not to do that are still good." She bit her lip, stared at Piebald. "Tell me exactly what happened when I took your hand, when we hung the system." Piebald turned his head sideways, stared back. "I felt different. Full, incredibly full...stuffed....And everything seemed to run together for an instant. Then the system was hung, and I was...empty again? A little different. I guess I know that something's missing, now. I never knew before." He looked at Angela with a yellow eye. "It's something to do with *her*. I'm sure of it." "Full of what?" said Angela sharply--she didn't like the way he talked about her in front of her, as if she weren't real. "Missing what?" "I don't know," he said, a little sharply in return. "I have no idea." Jayhawk to Angela: "Caroline sees him as entirely lacking in something a person should have, but she can't tell what." "Do you *want* to be full again?" Angela said to Piebald. "Did you like it?" "I'm not sure." He frowned at her. "Why are you asking me so many questions?" "I get the feeling that Jayhawk is asking me to do something that could get me hurt really badly. I want to know what's going on." "I could get hurt really badly too." He shook his head, bells clattering. "So ask me questions, I don't mind." Just don't talk in front of me like I'm not even here! "I don't have any questions to ask." "Well, but you should at least understand why I do!" She turned to Jayhawk, said savagely, "How would I go about doing whatever it is you're hinting at?" "Offer him what I offered you," said Jayhawk simply. "Meaning it. I meant it utterly. I still do. Caroline thinks you're worthy of our trust, and she has the vision to know." "And what will happen then?" Jayhawk shook her head, took Angela's hand in a strong grip. "I don't know. It's been like that; feeling our way all along. But this--" She gestured around at the frozen beauty of the system. "This has to be a win for Paradisio. I'll take whatever risks are necessary." Angela pulled her hand away, sat rocking on the latticework platform. Jayhawk stared at her for a moment, then folded her arms, wrapped herself into what she seemed to consider a sitting position, twined around a webstrand. Caroline doesn't do that, Angela thought, a small stillness amid the confusion of her emotions. Different, they're different--that's why they won't become one again. Neither one will give up what she is. And yet...isn't that what they're asking of me? She stared at Piebald, hating his ugliness, the inhuman beak of his face, the garish jester's clothing. At the very least, they're asking me to give up my whole life, everything I know and can cope with--Mark, my family, my career.... Softly, almost as if she was reading Angela's mind, Jayhawk said, "The hardest part is already over; you're here, and you know you're here. There's only one direction to go, and nerving yourself to that isn't as bad as you would think. I know. I took the key to the Overnet from *his* hands." Angela climbed slowly to her feet, held out both hands to Piebald. He stared back at her in mistrust, glanced quickly at Jayhawk. "Well?" she said, voice harsher than she'd intended but at least not shaking. "Would *you* gamble on something like that? It's your choice as much as mine." A long, agonizing silence. She wasn't sure whether she wanted him to accept or refuse. To see Anubis, alive, to be part of what was happening...but god, she was afraid.... "All right," he said roughly, reached out to lay long cold fingers across her hands. He was trembling too. "What strength and surety I have--" she had to laugh at that, a terrified shaky laugh "--I share with you freely." -- Jayhawk, waiting with nails biting into her palms for whatever catastrophe she'd just engendered, saw Piebald and Angela wreathed in a shimmer of white light, flecks like the snow on a dead vidscreen enveloping them, mounting to blinding brilliance. Abruptly they were gone, collapsing to light-scatter or melting into the floor of the CPU chamber, she couldn't quite tell which. With a heartstopping lurch, the system awoke around her, awoke and shuddered with the terrible strain it had been under, the accumulation of unmeetable demands-- reflexively she cancelled them, and learned in the instant of action that she was no longer wholly in control. Not the yellow sphere, nothing so foreign; it reminded her of the strength that had caught her in her fall into darkness. It slept in the depths of the CPU, making no answer to her tentative callings, and the whole system was heavy with the weight of its presence. There was a strange sense of expectancy to it, as if every increment of the system clock counted down time to some unguessable event. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 40441 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!sdd.hp.com!spool.mu.edu!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 54 Message-ID: <1991Jun5.210302.26081@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 5 Jun 91 21:03:02 GMT Sender: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 96 54. Dart *Jayhawk!* said a soundless voice, a flicker in the CPU's endless lightplay. *Are you there?* It was Caroline. Jayhawk located her at SAN 2, teleported them both to their personal chamber. There was a charred band on Caroline's wrist, which she was scratching at. "What's happening?" she demanded instantly. The explanations on both sides took some time. "I'm not at all sure that was the right thing to do," Jayhawk said at last. "I don't know how we can find out, other than waiting it out. I suggest we make good use of the time." "I have a bunch of projects for you," said Caroline. "I figured out how to manage the telecom link, for one thing. And I have another one of the devices that brought me here; Martha gave them to me. I was hoping you could disassemble it." "I could use some help myself," said Jayhawk, "on IC, mainly, and sensors. I've been having a lot of trouble with Lefty impersonating people." They set to work on the communications link. It seemed to go much more smoothly than it had, as if Jayhawk had found some new insight into it. She verified that when they turned to the problem of keeping Lefty out. "What we were doing was never going to work," she said, shaking her head. "I can see that now. They were using a variant of CPU teleport, but powered from outside the system so I couldn't block it. Hm. That's going to be hard." "This might help," said Caroline. "--Teleport me." She reached out to try, found her efforts countermanded. Caroline grinned. A little taken aback, Jayhawk poked her in the ribs, teleported her as she jumped reflexively. Caroline wasn't quite quick enough to stop her. Jayhawk brought her back, unresisted this time, nodded in approval. "Pretty good. Can you block me teleporting myself?" Caroline could, occasionally, when she could catch the command before it executed. She still couldn't teleport herself, however. "Interesting trick," said Jayhawk at last, "but I'm not quite sure how to apply it to keeping Lefty out. I'll think about it." They pulled apart the Barrier IC that Jayhawk and Piebald had written, found the elegant back door in it that Piebald had used. Jayhawk excised it. "I might want to use that myself, but if it's there for me it's there for Lefty." Things were a little tense between them, a little strained; but it still felt good to have Caroline back, to work with her. It filled in a little of what was lacking. Her new insight, satisfying as it was, didn't make up for Caroline's absence; she wanted the strange ideas tested, refined by the other's perception. And she badly wanted reassurance that she hadn't damned them both by persuading Piebald and Angela to their--merger? A wistful thought. Caroline drew a feathered dart from her pocket, looked at it curiously, recoiled. "Feels bad even to look at this; wrong, somehow." Jayhawk had the same sensation; a kind of queasiness, an instinctive revulsion for the idea of probing the dart too carefully. They put it aside, worked on other projects for a while. At last Caroline said, "I have to go back to the Matrix. I have an appointment with Dr. McDougall. Heaven knows how many I've already missed." With a tight grin, "The fetus thought it was worthwhile interrupting me; I'd like to prove her right." She took the dart out again, said wistfully, "I'd really like to be able to get back here. I went to Chalker's Gate, but I couldn't operate there--the link with you was too tenuous, I nearly vanished away. I don't know how else to do it, short of running one of the Paradisian Gate systems. I think I'm going to pull this thing apart, gut feeling or no gut feeling. Come handle containment for me, will you?" They moved to one of the heavily secured experiemental nodes in sector 3, Jayhawk toying with a project of her own--she wanted to haul the Lefty code out of Caroline's mind and disassemble *it*--while she watched Caroline work with the dart. Suddenly Caroline let out a soft gasp, crumpled to the floor. Jayhawk ran to her, found to her surprise that she seemed to be unconscious. She hadn't thought that was possible here, any more than on the Matrix. She scooped Caroline's body up, leaving the dart in the containment node, and took her back to their personal quarters, laid her on the bed-shelf. Caroline was alarmingly limp, her breathing very slow. Jayhawk took her hand, reached out to try to support her, lend her strength. For an instant she teetered on the edge of a bottomless abyss, her strength poured out into its hunger--pulled herself back with an effort, knowing that if *she* overspent herself there would be no return. She kept watch, working on her code. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 40442 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 55 Message-ID: <1991Jun5.210410.26241@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 5 Jun 91 21:04:10 GMT Sender: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 160 55. Wheel Caroline found herself standing before a familiar, ornate door, the door to the Overnet. The key was in her hand. She looked at it in shock. *Am I Jayhawk? No, I'm not. How can I have the key? Has something happened to her?* She reached out, felt a vague sense of her link with Anubis and Jayhawk, as if across a terrible distance. She couldn't tell whether they were all right, but even the faint touch was reassuring. She walked up to the door, unlocked it, stepped through. The short corridor was the same, and the door at its other end. "Everything has a price," it read. She opened it, found herself in the same high-vaulted brick chamber, the same ornate chair at its center. Lefty was sitting in it, watching her. "Wonderful!" he said. "You're way ahead of schedule. How did you find the price?" She said nothing, staring at him in hostility. Unperturbed, he went on, "You've surprised a lot of people. Even Martha, and Martha isn't easy to surprise. You've done a wonderful job for us, exactly what we needed." He grinned conspiratorially. *He's trying to demoralize me.* She didn't smile back. "Was that you running around the system, pretending to be other people?" "But of course." His grin widened. "You didn't have much luck at it, did you? What were you trying to accomplish?" He shook his head regretfully. "So. What do you think of insanity? Overrated, isn't it?" "*You* should talk," she retorted. He laughed. She'd never seen him so cheerful. It was intensely annoying. "Oh, I keep meaning to ask you: did Channa survive?" At her puzzled look: "After she read my mind. Some people don't." She weighed her words, decided there was no harm in answering. "She said you were no worse than a bad LSD trip." "I'm glad to hear it. If you see her again, will you tell her so for me? And Ratty, too. What your little friend did...." He shook his head in mock wonder. "Wish them both all the best for me." She tried to imagine the effect of actually delivering such a message. "You seem awfully cheery today." "I am indeed. They tell me--or rather, *he* tells me, sometimes--that I'll have a body again soon. Thanks to you, of course. Tell me, how does it feel to give birth? No, you wouldn't know yet. Soon." She turned away from his insinuative smile, remembering with dismay the feeling of expectant waiting in the CPU. "I would think," she said in a voice thick with malice, "that taking a bullet in your spleen once would deter you from wanting to have another." Her cheeks were burning. "Not at all. But tell me, what are you going to do about your own body? Still have plans for it?" She only snarled at him. "Come on now. There are people out there who'd really like to know." "I told them already," she said, thinking of Martha. "Nobody tells me anything," he said in mock petulance. "I'll do what I have to. If that includes having a physical form, great. If not--" she shrugged. "A very sensible attitude. I approve." There was no door leading out the other side of the room. Indeed, there was no door leading back the way she had come. She touched the hard brick, her back to Lefty. "So what do you want? Let's get on with this." "I'm waiting for your door to appear. That's all, really." In a suddenly serious voice, "The next part will be very hard. Take care, Jayhawk. You've done well so far, better than anyone expected. Ah. There it is. I'll be seeing you, then." She turned in time to see him sink down through the brick floor, vanish. There was still no door. She ran her hands over the wall, looking for a loose or illusory brick, found nothing. Faintly, as if from a great distance, Lefty's voice reached her: "Try up!" Ten meters above her, the dome was capped by some kind of device, difficult to make out in the sourceless, shadowless lighting. She stared up at it for a moment, then walked to the center of the room, where the chair had been. Arms outspread, she tried to will herself upwards. After all, Lefty had done it in Anubis. This wasn't the physical world (was it? it didn't feel like the Overnet) and the laws of flesh and blood didn't apply. It was simple. She rose about a meter, checked herself in startlement, then glided upward to the device. It was a hatch like the ones in Osiris, bearing a large wheel tipped with a steel spike. Trying to ignore the drop beneath her feet, she tugged at the wheel. It was hard to move without leverage, but slowly it began to turn. It was easier once she'd begun. Abruptly, the hatch of which it was a part dropped a centimeter or so, as if unlatched; she could sense a great weight on the other side. She hastily positioned herself to the side of the wheel, gave it one more turn. The hatch slammed open, and water began to pour in, a thundering column wetting her armor with its spray. It hit the floor below, began rapidly to rise. Caroline swore, tried to get a glimpse upward through the pillar of water, but there was only darkness. She'd have to wait until the room filled, take a deep breath and swim for it. She'd learned to swim in high school, but it seemed so very long ago....But if she could fly, surely she could swim. The water rose quickly, the hatchway above her letting out huge shuddering gulps of air into the unseen area above. The room darkened as the water rose, and the air became chill and dank. When it tickled her feet she pulled them up, hovered in a sitting position, but still it rose, up to her waist, her shoulders. It was bitter cold. The flow slackened, cut off. For a moment her concentration wavered, and she almost sank; then she caught herself, rose up through the hatchway. She was at the bottom of a completely drained fountain or pool, curving cement walls around her. It was nighttime, brilliant stars overhead. *Am I back at the Pyramid?* She rose higher, striking a dramatic pose. It felt good to fly, almost like being cradled in Anubis; free and yet secure. The pool was extensive, broken by a series of small islands with trees, grass, a couple of picnic benches. They were linked by delicate footbridges. Beyond the edge of the pool was some kind of hedge maze, extending out to the edge of a dimly-visible forest. She turned slowly, looking at the pattern of the hedges. Was it a map of the High Temple's corridors? Suddenly it clicked into place, pathways becoming internodes, crossings becoming nodes. Not the High Temple. The hedge maze was a crude map of Anubis. She let herself settle onto the largest of the islands. As she set foot on it, the ground trembled, a rumble of distant thunder. In a surge of panic, she called up power, flung herself upwards, felt the more-than- sufficient response around her. *The CPU! The islands are the CPU of the hedge-maze Anubis! Mustn't let the Lefty code kick in.* She landed in the maze itself, sat down on the soft ground, suddenly exhausted--adrenaline running out, or that's what it would have been if she'd been corporeal. She wondered if Jayhawk was all right. Lefty had seemed to address her as if she were the only one. But she still felt incomplete. She reached out to the night, felt the garden-maze all around her. Not Anubis, but somehow comfortingly like. She curled up in the shadow of a hedge, thin silver body-armor already dry; she'd managed to keep her hair out of the water, and she was much warmer already. Before she quite knew what was happening, she was asleep. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 40610 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!think.com!spool.mu.edu!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 56 Message-ID: <1991Jun7.153055.29095@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 7 Jun 91 15:30:55 GMT Article-I.D.: agate.1991Jun7.153055.29095 Sender: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 173 56. Water Caroline woke to brilliant sunlight. She stretched, a little stiff from sleeping on the ground, looked around her and recoiled. Feathers. The hedge was not vegetation at all, but a mass of green and brown plumage. The "grass" beneath her was composed of short, tough green feather-blades, though when she tugged at it it felt, if not quite like grass, not particularly feathery either. She scrambled to her feet, walked back to the edge of the drained pool. *Everything* was made of feathers, including the park bench on a nearby island, and the tree spreading above it. The bridges between the islands were solid masses of overlapping feathers. A quick look at herself reassured her; she, at least, didn't have feathers. She felt well-rested, and, to her relief, not at all hungry. She still vividly remembered starving in the woods. After a moment of staring at the pool, then went off to search the hedge maze. She could identify nodes, but they were just places in the garden; she had no access to system operations, no sense of really being in a computer. Perhaps it was just an image. The forest beyond the garden was also made entirely of feathers, green and shadowy. She looked at it and shuddered. Back to the pool, she jumped down to the bottom, walked along it looking at the islands. The concrete, at least, was not feathery; and there was real dirt on the islands within their concrete casings. At the deepest point of the pool, she looked down into the open hatchway, smelled the water below. *I hope this isn't Anubis in some arcane sense,* she thought, trying to imagine how Jayhawk would react to the news that she'd let the water out of the CPU.... Idly, she pulled the hatch closed, felt it click into place. There was no apparent way to open it from this side. For several hours she walked through the channels and deeps of the pool, looking for some hint as to what she could do to escape. She wanted to go back to Anubis and Jayhawk. At last she willed herself upward, hoping that the daylight view would offer some insight. Up and up. There was a limit to her flight, somewhere above the tallest trees, a dizzying distance. The pool and garden spread out beneath her, brilliant in the sun. The resemblance of the hedge-maze to Anubis was just as clear by daylight, but she could make no sense of the pool. There were--she checked herself, counting--exactly as many islands as there were nodes in Anubis or open places in the hedge maze. But their arrangement, and that of the delicate bridges between them, was all wrong. She landed in the shallows of the pool, set a very cautious foot on an island, ready to leap back. Nothing happened. She climbed up onto it, stood looking around. Feathers everywhere; even the apparent wrought- iron of the bench supports was feathery, on closer examination. If this were part of a CPU, it was as dead as Anubis had been after the fetus attacked. She felt no response at all to her mental commands. She walked the islands, looking them over. On the largest and most central there was a trashcan (made of feathers) as well as a bench. With the eye of a seasoned computer-game player, she noted it. Nothing else proffered itself. Maybe I need the water back. The islands did seem much less interesting with an empty basin around them. She lay on her back on the feather-grass, stared up at the sky. There were a few white clouds drifting by. She reached out to them, tried to chivvy them together, make a thunderhead. She had just time to realize that the task was beyond her strength, though not beyond her ability to attempt, before an overwhelming wave of fatigue washed over her and drew her under. Some time later--the sun was definitely sinking--she came around, headachy but otherwise unharmed. She rolled over, rested her chin on the ground. What did I do? Channa used to knock herself out that way when she was trying to heal someone who was too badly hurt. Hurt herself seriously a couple of times, too. Was she a magician now? The idea was both intriguing and disturbing. She'd have to be more careful until she figured out how things worked. In any case, she wasn't going to refill the pool that way. She lay down near the edge of an island, looking down into the cool depths of the empty basin, and called out gently to the water, wincing at the thought of overexerting herself that way again. Something very heavy and quite near at hand went THUNK. A wave of dizzy nausea swept over her; she closed her eyes, rested her head on her arms for several minutes. At last her stomach settled. There was still no water in the pool. She slid down into the basin, walked to its deepest point, tried to call the water from there. Confirming her unformed suspicions, something struck the pool bottom violently from below. THUNK. She continued to call, and it continued to strike, rhythmic and futile, until she felt too sick to go on. She climbed back into the sunlight, rested her head in her hands. I closed the hatch! How stupid! She wanted to kick herself. Perhaps she could open it again. She sat on the dry concrete, concentrated on imagining the wheel. A strange, vivid sense of the cold dark chamber beneath came over her, blotting out sun and sky; she could almost see the wheel, gleaming dully in the near-total blackness of the drowned room. She reached out, felt *something*--but her strength was utterly inadequate to shift it, as if she were unanchored, nowhere to stand. She wrapped her arms around the imagined wheel, definitely felt it--burning cold, searing into her bare skin. After a moment she had to let go. The sun and sky returned, her eyes protesting. There were dull red weals on both arms, fading slowly as she watched. She tried to pick the lock by visualizing it, but her ignorance of such crude machinery defeated her. She couldn't see it clearly, had no effect on it at all. She tried to pull water up through the narrow crack around the hatch, widening it--stopped in horror, sensing that it was her own mind she was eroding away. She had no way to test that, but she didn't try it again. At last she willed her thoughts into the cold darkness again, mentally constructed a large, four-armed lever which she clamped to the wheel. She could feel the device she was imagining, though only in flickers, never entirely real. She gripped the end of her lever, almost feeling that she was dangling above the black water, pulled on it with all her might. Nothing. Apparently the hatch was stuck. She wondered briefly whether she was just deluding herself, then set herself to think of a different approach. Eventually she closed her eyes, slipped once more into the darkness. Hovering at the surface of the water, she conjured up a heavy sledgehammer, struck the recalcitrant wheel. She could *hear* the heavy clang, transmitted through the earth beneath her. Weariness crept into her, though she could feel that she was still lying unmoving on the soft grass. Finally the wheel gave way, turned freely at her mental touch. She crawled to the edge of the pool, looked down. The hatch was open again. All that because I was dumb and shut it! She laughed weakly, sprawled on the grass to rest. When she felt strong enough, she called up the water again. The results were unexpectedly spectacular. It shot up from the hatchway in a half-meter-wide geyser, seemed to strike an invisible barrier at the level of the islands and spread out, filling the pool from the top down with layers of swirling blue-white. Watching made her dizzy, as if she were upside down. She forced herself to concentrate on the hatch, slammed it shut mentally as soon as the water stopped spraying out. She felt the clang through the island's cement understructure, let out a delighted yell. The pool glimmered in the sunlight. Tiredness forgotten, she waded out into it. It was deliciously warm, though already cooling, and perfectly clear once the froth settled. She splashed like a child for several minutes, pleased with herself. She still wasn't sure what to do, but bringing the water back definitely felt like an accomplishment. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 40612 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!think.com!spool.mu.edu!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 57 Message-ID: <1991Jun7.153215.29347@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 7 Jun 91 15:32:15 GMT Article-I.D.: agate.1991Jun7.153215.29347 Sender: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 81 57. Islands After some casting around, Caroline decided that the thing to do was to rearrange the islands into a proper image of Anubis. She came to this rather by default; short of going into the forest, she couldn't think of anything else to do. The water glittered around the islands, sparkling with power--she could feel it. There must be something she could do with it. She lay on the central island, which she guessed might represent the CPU, and tried to tug an adjacent island into position by sheer willpower. As long as she kept her eyes closed she had a vague sense that it might be working, or about to work. When she opened her eyes it was apparent that she was deluding herself. The island was just sitting there, concrete and immovable. She tried mentally linking and unlinking bridges, to no avail. Tired of futile concentration, she got up, tried to unhook a bridge by simple brute force. For a construction of feathers, it was remarkably tough; it bounced a little under her weight, but it wouldn't give. She fetched the feathered trashcan, wetted the bridge down thoroughly with water from the pool. It wasn't any more malleable when soggy. Convinced that there was power inherent in the water, she wetted down a whole island, one of the smaller ones. That wasn't productive either. She threw the can in the pool, watched it sink. She had a nagging sense, whenever she tried to shift an island, that it *could* be done. But she couldn't find the trick to it. She lay with eyes closed, tried to visualize the entire set of islands, shape them into Anubis in one operation. It was devilishly hard, perhaps the hardest intellectual exercise she'd ever tried. When she had a perfect island/Anubis layout in her mind, she reached out to the islands, was ignored. She tried sitting in the water, directing the islands to move. She tried visualizing the water, rather than the islands, as a map of Anubis, changing the channels. She tried starting a current in the water to sweep the islands about. (Her will made ripples, but she couldn't sustain a real current.) She mentally superimposed the hedge maze on the islands, trying to force one into the other; flew high enough to see both at once, tried to pull them into correspondence. She swore and stomped about in the shallows. That wasn't useful either, but it made her feel better. The other approaches only gave her a headache. Trying anything from outside the pool and islands did have a discernably different feel--it didn't seem even deceptively possible, if she were standing in the hedge maze or the margins of the forest. Caroline sat down on the biggest island, watching the sun dip--it was halfway down the sky now. She was intensely frustrated. She tried mentally pinching the islands off below water level, a last stray thought. Nothing stirred. Eventually she came back to an idea she had considered and rejected earlier. Try to pull an island into CPU emulation. Walk right into Lefty's mind-programming. Intuition suggested that that was the answer. "No!" she said aloud. She wouldn't submit to Lefty's design, not after she'd come so far, worked so hard to avoid it. The fetus had taken great pains to separate her from Dr. McDougall; she must really have had a chance to escape Lefty's control. She wouldn't throw it away now by giving in willingly. There *must* be another way. The possibility of power, dimly sensed in the unintelligable symbols of the place, tugged at her. But she had made that choice already. She would not recant it now. She dug her nails into the feathery grass, the soil below, until they bled. Intuition whispered that there was no other escape. She was trapped. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 40613 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!spool.mu.edu!agate!codon1!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon1 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 58 Message-ID: <1991Jun7.153338.29489@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 7 Jun 91 15:33:38 GMT Sender: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 179 58. Hawk Caroline was awakened in the early dawn by an unexpected sound of birdsong. She sat up, looked about. Perched high in the branches of the tree above her was a small blue bird with a pointed crest on its head. It had a shrill, rasping voice, musical only by courtesy. "Here, bird," she called it. It stopped singing for a moment to consider, then went on. A Paradisian spy? she wondered. It made her uneasy, as the featheriness of her surroundings did; too much of a reminder of the Feathered Serpent she had seen in the High Temple. But it *was* the only living thing she'd seen here--there weren't even insects among the feathers. Attracted despite her uneasiness, she set out to climb the tree. Knowing that she could fly did wonders for her usual fear of high places; she was almost on a level with the bird when it took alarm, flew off. It arced up--and seemed to strike a barrier, feathers exploding from it. A small hawk angled down toward her, the blue bird dangling from its talons. Unaccountably cheered--so much for the Paradisian spy!--Jayhawk held out her arm for the hawk to land. Instead, it swooped past her and then climbed again. Having gotten a better look at its claws during the pass, she wasn't entirely sorry. She willed herself into the air, climbed toward it. It looked at her with what might have been approval, then winged off sharply, away from the pool and islands. She followed, skimming over hedgetops. As she came to the edge of the forest, she realized suddenly that she would fall if she crossed it, outside the range of the force that upheld her. She dipped down, flew only a meter above the ground, but didn't land, defying the intuition. *She* could fly, she didn't need hedges and pools to do it. Crossing the boundary, she found how wrong she had been. For an instant she thought she would fall--and then she *was* flying, truly flying, not just suspended by another's power like a stuntman on a wire. It was glorious, even better than the bike rides with Martha. Free in three dimensions, unshackled from the ground....The hawk flew into the forest, and she followed, weaving recklessly among feathered treetrunks, exulting in speed. The forest darkened as they went on, reminding her painfully of her long hike through the woods after the fall of the Hidden Fortress, starving and feverish. But that had been when she was human, with human weaknesses--she caught that thought, wondered at it. It was true. She didn't hunger or thirst anymore, and sky and water obeyed her. She didn't need to fear the forest. They burst out into a wide clearing. It was studded with stone pillars, each one carved with images of birds--some brilliantly painted, some inlaid with colored stones, others merely patterns in the grey rock, ornate or stylized or startlingly lifelike. At the center of the pillars was an enormous tree, easily double the height of the surrounding forest. It was leafless, apparently dead, but somehow she knew that it drew life from its roots, unimaginably deep roots. There was a huge untidy nest in its crown. The hawk flew harder, climbing for the nest, Caroline pursuing it. It dropped the bird in, perched on one side of the nest. She landed on the other, looked down for one dizzying instant--she was fifty meters off the ground--and settled herself firmly on one of the nest's component branches. The nest held a huge, speckled egg, grossly too large to belong to the hawk. The dead bird was dwarfed beside it. The hawk cocked its head at her, and there were words in its movements, like the flicker of lightplay in which Jayhawk spoke to her when they were in Anubis but not together. *Jayhawk, Nose to the Wind.* She flushed. That had been one of her more inane posting aliases. "Just Jayhawk." *What do you see?* She hesitated, weighing the question. She didn't know what she was talking to, Paradisian agent or spirit or projection of some part of herself; but it seemed a creature to be taken seriously. "An egg; the beginning of something new, a new possibility. And a dead bird, the end of a life; maybe food for what's in the egg." *Whose is it?* She put a palm against the egg. It was startlingly warm, as if its huge mother had just left it--she glanced about, but no giant bird was at hand. An old thing, this egg, old beyond her knowledge, and heavy with power of its own. "I don't have an answer to that question," she said at last. It might be the Dragon's egg, might be Piebald and Angela brooded in the CPU of Anubis, might be something entirely different. She didn't know, and she was somehow afraid to guess wildly. "Do you know?" *I see many things from the high places. Do you want to share my knowledge?* She remembered what Channa had told her about spirits, chose her words carefully. "I would rather share your freedom, if it's real freedom and not the kind where you fly for a while and go back to your master's hand." *Well spoken.* It bent its fierce head, rubbed its beak against one talon. *If you are to be a predator, you must be prepared to kill.* Ratty had told her that one condition on the Spider's chosen students was that they must have killed. She'd racked her memory, been unable to remember or decide exactly whose life she had taken in the madness of Wired Lightning and Cavilard Base. But she'd never doubted that she had. That was before Aliantha, of course. She had certainly killed Aliantha, though not deliberately. "I know." *And do you accept the Balance?* She looked away, reining in anger. "I've never heard anyone explain 'balance' who didn't make it mean 'despair'. They say you can't do good without doing evil, that any progress in one area necessarily worsens another. I deny that." *That is despair. It is not what I mean. The Balance is the pattern of the whole world, the way of all that is.* "The whole world--what can you say about that, what does it mean to accept or deny? Unless you mean madness, losing contact with reality--is that what's 'against the Balance'?" It regarded her with a bright hard eye. *What would you do with your freedom?* An answer came to her almost unbidden, though she realized she'd been puzzling at it ever since she took up the key. "I would try to free others." She wondered if the hawk heard the death-threat in that. 'I would kill you if I could,' she had said to the Dragon. Deep inside she was terrified at what she was saying. She had not the faintest idea how she could make such a threat real. Escape was hard enough to imagine.... *And what would you say to those you preyed upon?* She frowned. "I don't know." Choosing her words carefully, "I will have to wait for the situation to teach me." *It is unwise to go forward until you have answered this.* "What can I say? I don't understand your question." *It is the Balance. A hunter depends on her prey; if the prey perishes she will as well.* With cold defiance, Caroline said, "You're the one who called me a predator; it wasn't my idea. I would rather create than destroy. But some things demand a response." She had used those words to Martha, speaking of *his* pain. "I refuse to bind myself to them, dying if I defeat them. I won't accept that." *Now you speak as Fire, as Man. Very well. I give you your freedom.* It leaped into the air, the wind from its wings buffeting her, and flew steeply upwards. She tipped her head back, watched it circle once, then stoop toward her at a terrifying speed, wings folded back. She threw her arms up, a gesture half welcoming, half warding. Its dive was lovely, perfect in its lethal precision. Up until the very moment of impact she still half believed it would turn aside. Ignoring her outstretched arms, it struck her forehead, talons splintering bone, digging into the depths of her. She screamed, wrapped her arms around its beating wings in agony as it clawed at her. In a spasm of pain, she felt the branche she was clinging to shatter, let her fall. The bird climbed above her, something dark and wriggling clenched in its talons. Have to fly! she demanded of herself through the blinding pain. But unconsciousness took her before she knew whether she had succeeded. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 41155 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!think.com!spool.mu.edu!agate!codon2!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon2 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 59 Message-ID: <1991Jun14.153118.15984@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 14 Jun 91 15:31:18 GMT Article-I.D.: agate.1991Jun14.153118.15984 Sender: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 133 59. Death Jayhawk heard a moan from the bed-shelf, looked up to see Caroline rubbing at her forehead. Her hand came back sticky with blood. *Blood? Here?* "Caroline! Are you all right?" They both dabbed at it. There was no obvious wound, though quite a lot of blood. One smear, a crescent mark in the middle of Caroline's forehead, proved to be indelible. "A talon," said Caroline when Jayhawk described it. "The hawk...." She looked up at Jayhawk, wide-eyed. "I think I might be free of the Lefty code." "I've been working on a program to detect it," said Jayhawk hastily. She called up the lens she had crafted, examined Caroline with it. The results were more visual than she had anticipated, unable to test it; a ghostly image of Caroline, glimpses of layers upon layers of complexity within her. There was a deep wound on the image's forehead, still bleeding slowly. In the depths of the wound was a cavity, a vacant space containing only a little bloody froth. "You may be right." It was a disturbing vision. She remembered what Caroline had said of Piebald: lacking entirely in one of the things that makes up a real person. Even backed by the software, her vision wasn't good enough to see something like that. But the idea bothered her. "What on earth happened?" She walked with Caroline to the security node while Caroline explained, then teleported into the CPU and stood on the threshhold, watching her. Almost reflexively, she drew her blade, held it in a guard position across her body. Caroline stared at her for a moment, then walked up the web-strand and stepped into the CPU. Holding her breath, Jayhawk monitored her. There was not even a flicker from the system. With explosive energy Caroline swarmed up an internal support, flung herself into the control-console webbing. She reached out a tentative hand to the main controls, drew back, then slipped over the side of the hammock and fell, landing just in front of Jayhawk. The manuver was a little startling; Jayhawk herself always climbed down. "All right," Caroline said. "I'm here, though nothing answers me. You said that if we were together in the CPU you might be able to manage the re-merger without driving us mad." Jayhawk stared at her in dismay. It was true; she had the power, here, to make them one again. She might even have been able to force it over Caroline's objections. But in the process she would cease to exist, except as shattered fragments in a consciousness alien to hers. She was not quite sure the resulting individual would be insane. She knew that it wouldn't be herself. Caroline apparently read her answer in her eyes. She turned away slowly, climbed back up to the controls. Jayhawk found that she was still holding the drawn lightblade, put it away with a sharp gesture and climbed after her. "Do you know how the dart works now?" she ventured, balancing on the edge of the hammock. Caroline held out her hand; Jayhawk called the dart from its containment chamber, dropped it on her palm. Caroline looked at it and swore softly. "Sure do. It's got a feather from a Feathered Serpent in it...a *particular* Feathered Serpent. I don't think we'll be making any more of these any time soon." She tucked it away in her belt pouch with a frown. "You're a magician," said Jayhawk softly. Caroline snorted. "Maybe. I *failed*, Jay. There was something there for me to grasp, some understanding, power....I couldn't figure it out." She knotted her hands fiercely. "So I can identify feathers, well, I've been seeing nothing else for days. A consolation prize." "Being free of the Lefty code is more than that." Caroline indicated the silent controls with a wild gesture. "If it's freedom and not just being too crippled to--" She let out a cry, clutched at Jayhawk's arm. Her face was bone-white, the red mark standing out vividly. "Oh, god, Jay. I'm *dying*, my body is...." She released Jayhawk, stared off into nothingness. Jayhawk heard what spoke to her, as if echoed through Caroline's thoughts. *If you go back you will be free no longer, having put yourself in their grasp. There is no other way you could have been freed. Take your flesh as your first prey.* "No!" snarled Caroline, and then in a rush of words to Jayhawk: "Back me, I'm going to try to pull it here--not the physical, that can't exist here--information--" She reached out to a suddenly-appearing flaw in the empty space within the CPU, an ugly crimson-and-green gash. Jayhawk threw her arms around Caroline as an anchor, tried to feed her power. The system, still sluggish with the unknown presence in the CPU, slowed still further. Something was forming around Caroline's hands, a haze of silver-blue thread almost too fine to see. She pulled it to herself, let it collect around her like a loose garment as she reeled in more and more. The thread darkened as it went on, midnight blue smudged with black. Abruptly it came to an end. The last few centimeters were slick with blood. Caroline slumped into Jayhawk's embrace, thread spilling down her body like a flowing dress, silver and electric blue and black tangled in an incomprehensible pattern. There was a glitter to it that didn't come from the lights of the CPU. Her eyes were closed, her face chalky. "Dead," she whispered. "The information is here...but out there, nothing...." "Can we back that up?" said Jayhawk, trying to distract her from her misery. "No. That's why Aliantha's really dead. Some things don't copy." "How do you feel?" "More real, if anything. More definitely here." She laughed shakily. "Which makes sense, I suppose. Maybe it's just as well...not being tempted to go back...." Jayhawk, who had never understood that temptation, wrapped her arms more tightly around Caroline. The changes in her other self worried her intensely. What else was missing besides the Lefty code, what else changed along with her ability to work with the dart? *Is she free? Or only bound to someone else?* She wished she could offer Caroline what she had offered Piebald: belonging, support, the bonding of allegiance. But they were too close--it would force the merger, she sensed. Once she had wanted that. In a way she still did. But the price was impossibly high. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 41256 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!agate!codon2!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon2 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 60 Message-ID: <1991Jun17.023443.19454@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 17 Jun 91 02:34:43 GMT Sender: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 159 60. Flight "I have to go back to the Matrix," Caroline said at last. "I owe Dr. McDougal an explanation, and I have to find out what I can do, now." "One dart left," said Jayhawk unhappily. "Better make it a good trip." "I can get back," said Caroline, startled by the discovery. "There's a trick to it, kind of a ritual...." She considered the matter, surprised herself further. "I can even get to the physical world, though it'll cost me." "Good grief. In what form?" "I have no idea. Guess it'll have to be tried." She couldn't imagine, herself--brief images of a bird, a woman, a sprite like the daemons of Anubis, but none of them seemed plausible. "Take care of yourself, Jay." "You too! And watch out for Lefty." Caroline walked to the end of the latticework bridge, stared down at Ares turning beneath them. So close...but she couldn't bridge the gap without Jayhawk's help and consent, or at least if she could it would take drastic measures. "Your move, Jay." As before, in the instant of transition she saw the Matrix like a galaxy spread out beneath her, systems spinning off into unimaginable distance, complexity beyond her comprehension. She clutched tightly to the communications link Jayhawk had crafted for her, hoping that this time she'd be able to tell the other about her experience. To her delight, the link held. She scampered away from the Ares-moon on which she'd landed, snapped a confirming message back to Jayhawk, and ran off to check her mail. McDougall had sent her over a dozen messages in the last--two weeks? She stared at the date, dismayed. Anubis' system clock had logged only a couple of days. The later messages were increasingly anxious. She sent a reply which said simply that she had found a chance for freedom, and dared not risk talking to him until things were settled, one way or another. If Paradisio didn't know what had happened to her, she wasn't going to make it easier for them to find out. There was also a message from Kurt. It began with a wry note that he knew he shouldn't be talking to her, for both their sakes, and then went on to ask detailed questions about the destruction of the Hidden Fortress. She answered them as best she could, sent that off too, and then chased it across the open Matrix to Seattle. In the CPU at Osiris, she began a set of cautious experiments. She could see into the other nodes of the system, brief glimpses rather like Jayhawk's description of her own monitoring abilities--not overwatch, but useful. She considered making and breaking system connections, but found herself oddly squeamish about the idea. Osiris was someone else's system now, and it seemed wrong to deform it, possibly damage it, for her own convenience. She was fairly certain that she could do it, both make connections and break them, drawing on Anubis' power. But she'd have to wait for a more reasonable opportunity to test that. An email message arrived for her, along the tenuous link back to Anubis. >Caroline-- > >I have a nagging feeling that we may find ourselves enemies soon, if >one of us chooses a course of action the other can't accept. I don't >want that, but I'm having trouble seeing how to avoid it. I hope you >can. > >Jayhawk She sat and considered it for a long time. She'd felt the same thing, though Jayhawk was more direct than it had occured to her to be. Enemies, or at least adversaries. They'd nearly come to it over Piebald and Angela, and if Jayhawk decided that the course Caroline had coaxed her into was wrong....She remembered the iron strength of Jayhawk's grip on her, when she had defied the Dragon and accepted death. She was glad, infinitely glad; she hadn't wanted to die. But Jayhawk would have done the same even if she had. At last she sent a response: >Jayhawk-- > >I understand what you're saying, and I don't want it either. > >If we can't be one again, and perhaps we should accept that we can't, >we need to be more separate, so that if one of us falls the other won't >be damned by it. This arrangement is too close for friendship. I'll >think about how to do this. You should too. > >Caroline She sent the message with a convulsive flick at the virtual controls, cast about for something else to try. Osiris was a submarine, cramped and enclosed. Instinct prompted for a larger, more open space. She went out into the open Matrix, the sketched-in landscape of telecom connections spreading out like a wilderness of freeways around her. Overhead, featureless grey scrolled from horizon to horizon--closer than in the physical world, boundaries of the local telecom grid. She'd never really looked at the Matrix sky before, or at least not in years. With a melodramatic gesture of her arms--she could feel the life-web clinging to them, though on the Matrix she couldn't see it--she willed herself upwards. It was hard, much harder than it had been on the islands, as if she were tearing herself away from the ground. Slowly the landscape expanded around her, systems rising up like massive bluffs amid the concrete rivers--there was Osiris, rather less like a submarine from this perspective, a blocky square of machinery. Other systems, dozens of them, blurring off to the horizon. It was still the same horizon, she could sense; a telecom boundary, beyond the limits of her vision. Further from the Matrix, she was closer to something else; an interface with the Overnet, perhaps. She felt it as a shimmering curtain, somewhere above her in the grey. Unreachable unless she wanted to pass beyond it, to Anubis or the island-gardens. She couldn't move horizontally at all. But it was flight, of a kind. Tiring, she let herself settle. The telecom grid looked different, now that she'd seen it from above. Osiris' SAN, Acces IC planted firmly across it, was part of a larger, remembered pattern, something that even in designing the system imagery she'd never seen. Wait. The IC hadn't challenged her when she entered; she hadn't even given it a passcode. She walked up to the SAN, climbed the rampway. The IC was a barred gate, not locked, but with alarms to note unauthorized entry. She pushed it open, stared at it. The alarms were active, she could see that. But they were oblivious to her. *I'm here, dammit!* she said silently to them, and suddenly there were red lights flashing on the security panels, a klaxon somewhere further inside. Hastily she silenced them. So she *could* be seen--not quite a ghost yet. Why hadn't they seen her at first? Her first hour of weaving through the University net, probing into one machine and another, suggested to her that if she wished to be she was simply invisible to IC, and perhaps to deckers at well--none of the three she met took any notice of her. Then she stumbled upon a new machine, the pride and joy of the Physics Department's most recent project, and set off a frighteningly sharp response when she tried to walk through its portal. She fended the IC off, beat a hasty retreat. Only systems she knew. She considered that, came to a more intuitive conclusion. Only systems she had known when she made Anubis, systems whose tricks and techniques she'd incorporated into Anubis, into herself. Another hour's experimentation left her fairly certain of it. New or old, if the machine used the principles she was familiar with, it wouldn't see her unless she wished it to. But there were more principles she didn't know than her pride would have suggested. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 41257 of rec.games.frp: Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!agate!codon2!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@codon2 (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford) Subject: Story: Jayhawk 61 Message-ID: <1991Jun17.023703.19754@agate.berkeley.edu> Sender: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu Organization: University of California, Berkeley Date: Mon, 17 Jun 1991 02:37:03 GMT Lines: 57 61. Manifestation Caroline had an intuitive feeling that she could exist in the physical world, and curiosity nagged at her to try it, difficult though it was to imagine. A little experimentation told her that she couldn't reach the outside from Osiris CPU; she needed a connection, perhaps an I/O port. In the EE building, she recalled, there was a dish antenna linked to the main computer, alone on a rooftop where she wouldn't have to deal with spectators. She found it without difficulty, a tangle of machinery on the Matrix. With a deep breath, she set her mind in the appropriate pattern, walked into it. High above the turning Earth, a telecom satellite made a minor course adjustment, a puff of vapor from its manuvering jets. Drifting downwards, into the fringes of the atmosphere, the icy droplets clung together, coalescing as the Earth tugged at them, their fall accelerating-- City lights, spread out in glittering complexity below, stretching out and out to the gathering horizons-- A flicker of self-awareness, falling, I'm falling, as layers of cloud whipped by, invisible touches, blending with the clinging droplets and weighing them down-- Icy cold, tangible now, she could feel herself in the accreting mass of vapor, the center of it compacting, forming into something solid. Ghost of wings, a beak-- She was dying, the careful weave of her life about her fraying, weakening. No. The fall would not kill her, but it would lessen her, life given up to the icy wind, the hugeness of the sky, for manifestation. A little death. Rush of wind about her, the city almost recognizable below, more continous than the Matrix but of the same awesome complexity-- Acceleration, the wind itself shaping her, speed beyond anything she had ever imagined-- Caroline pulled herself back, found herself curled in the center of an antenna dish, on the Matrix. She cried out aloud, pounded her hands on the cold metal. It had been glorious, the sense of freedom, the joy of feeling herself, despite all Paradisio's traps, still alive, still able to act in the physical world.... It spent resources she couldn't spare, not if she wanted to do what she'd bragged to the hawk she would do. Free those Paradisio kept imprisoned. Destroy *him*. She sent a message to Forked Lightning: I'd like to see you, maybe tomorrow night? And flung herself into the island-gardens, desperately determined that this time she would find their secret, not have to limit herself at all any more. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 41948 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!cs.uoregon.edu!milton!phylo.genetics.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 62 Message-ID: <1991Jun25.010314.28553@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 25 Jun 91 01:03:14 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 229 62. Bridges Almost before she realized that she was falling, Caroline hit the ground with a bone-rattling thud. All around her, she could hear birds taking flight, though for a moment she was too dazed to see. When she'd caught her breath, she sat up, looked around. She was among pillars carved with birds, at the foot of a huge, leafless tree. High overhead, a black speck was circling. There were no other birds to be seen. Back in the gardens, though not where she'd expected to be--she had visualized the central island. Why here? One of the nearby pillars depicted hawks, including a few like the one she'd spoken to. When she examined the pictures more carefully, each hawk was made up of smaller images, precise and detailed, no two exactly the same. And on even closer viewing, those too contained tinier hawks, multitudes of them. She touched the cold stone thoughtfully. A datastore of a kind, perhaps? It might hold answers to some of her myriad questions. After a moment she turned away. Still angry and hurt over her body's death, the hawk's presumption, she didn't feel like dealing with something so obviously part of its domain. Back at the islands there was power of *hers*, waiting for her to grasp--she was sure of it. She didn't need this. She willed herself into the air, grinned with delight--flying was much more comfortable than walking. The tree towered above her. She spiralled around it, curious to see what had become of the egg, the dead bird. But three-quarters of the way up, above the canopy of the surrounding forest but well below the nest, she seemed to reach a limit. The air was too thin to hold her up. Frustrated, she landed on a wide branch, looked down dizzily for an instant, then tore her eyes away and began to climb. She was sick of discovering limitations. She wasn't going to accept this one. There were branches in plenty, and she almost reached the top. But the last six meters were bare, and they ended in a spreading crown woven with thorns and pointed sticks. She balanced on the last branch, staring up. There was no way through, even if she could somehow have shinnied up the smooth trunk. *I have better things to do.* She launched herself from the branch, fell until the air enfolded her, winging out toward the break in the treetops which hid the island-garden. Testing her speed. No matter how fast she flew, the wind didn't tear at her; only caressed her, curling around her body like the promise of power. When she reached the islands she couldn't see the tall tree anymore, though it should have been clearly visible--she'd been able to see the break in the trees from there. She swore, hanging in the sky over the CPU-island, then dismissed it fiercely. *This* was the problem she'd come to solve. Not the pillars and tree. She landed at the center, tried once more to rearrange the islands by her will. As before, nothing happened. Unsurprised and even a little relieved--having come up with a plan, she wanted to try it--she sat down on the feathery grass, closed her eyes, and began to build. She'd done some research while she was on the Matrix, leafing through mechanical engineering textbooks, looking at machines. She hadn't been able to find one exactly suited to pulling out bridges, but she'd gotten some ideas. Wide feet to support it on the grass--she didn't want to damage the islands any more than she had to. A rotating belt to pull on the bridge, clamps to attach it. And a powerful engine. She colored it yellow, like the street-repair machinery she'd grown up with. It looked a little improbable in her mind's eye, but workable--or so she told herself resolutely. She mentally clamped it to one of the bridges, the one she'd decided should connect the CPU-island to a nearby but disconnected island which might be node 0-1, the isolation field chamber near the "Gate". Eyes still closed, she started up the engine. There was no noise, which shook her faith a little; but she persevered, putting the machine in gear, starting its belt rotating. -- Wild claxons. *System alert at 0-1.* Jayhawk teleported herself into the CPU, stared in horror at the fragile black-glass stairway which spiralled down to the isolation chamber. It was stretching, uncurling like an abused slinky. A railing shattered with a loud tinkling of glass. The system shuddered with the strain; she fed it power, struggling to contain the damage. "Dammit, Caroline!" she said aloud. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" She hoped it was Caroline. The stairway stretched further, indicators flaring red across the CPU as the stresses mounted. The outermost nodes, the SANs and watchtowers, were in real danger of being shaken loose. Desperate, she forced new connections, modifying the system map so that each SAN was bound to a triangle of adjacent nodes. It felt horribly wrong, a sin against the system's logic and beauty. But it reduced the shaking a little. -- The bridge had deep roots. Caroline could feel the strain on them as her machine increased its pull, a faint trembling transmitted through the concrete. She persevered, was rewarded at last with a wrenching snap, soft splashings along the edges of the pool. She opened her eyes. There was no machine to be seen, but the end of the bridge that had been anchored to the '0-1' island was several feet off the ground, a gaping hole beneath it. The situation felt a little uncomfortable, as if some flow or connection had been interrupted. Hastily, she set herself to cranking up the other end of the bridge as well. -- The stairway broke at last, leaving a gaping hole into greyness. As quickly as she could Jayhawk slammed down barriers, sealing off the wound in the system. It felt as if her own flesh were torn--not painful, but sickeningly wrong and ugly. She could contain the damage, for the moment. Furious and terrified, she dangled from her webbing in the CPU, cursing Caroline. A few more shocks like that and it wouldn't be just the outermost nodes breaking loose. The integrity of the entire system was deteriorating. -- It was peculiar to see the entire bridge suspended in the air. Caroline waded across the pool, picked up one end. There was a momentary resistance, and then it moved freely--though it looked like wood, it was feather-light. She turned it upside down, balanced it on her head to carry it to its new location. There she envisioned a new machine, this one taken straight from the textbook; a digging machine, to make holes the end of the bridge could fit into. She tried watching it dig, but that was too distracting; eventually she sat with eyes closed, finished both holes. The bridge fit fairly well, though it wasn't as secure as it had been. She pushed the dirt back into the holes by hand, tamped it down. Better, but still rather springy--it seemed that the bridge might have had roots, before she pulled it out. She fetched the trash can, dipped up water to wet the overturned earth. The resulting mud wasn't entirely reassuring either. She decided to wait and see how it dried before beginning another bridge. -- Jayhawk's improvised seal exploded suddenly, a prong of metal and glass sinking into the CPU--the missing stairway? But it looked *wrong*. No time for that, the join was imperfect, worsening the existing stresses. Hastily she tried to patch it up, pull the foreign material--it was the spiral stair to 0-1, or at least appeared to be--into alignment with the rest of Anubis. She had little choice. She'd destroy the entire system if she fought back. Communication with nodes 0-1 and 0-2, the Gate chamber itself, was intermittant, almost nonexistant--as if information were leaking out of the breaks in system connectivity like water from a pipe. She tried to staunch the leaks; gradually they slowed, though she wasn't certain that it was her doing. She didn't dare send a daemon to assess the damage to those nodes; she wasn't sure she'd get it back. And the thought of going there herself--of leaving the CPU at all, when at any moment a node might be snapped off--terrified her. Disconnected from Anubis! She would probably die. At last a minimal sort of connectivity was restored, though she was dismayed by the awkward, alien feel that the stairway now had. Though she still didn't dare enter the area, flickering glimpses suggested that the nodes were relatively intact--luckily they weren't among the more fragile parts of the system. Suddenly the horrible stretching began again, this time on the walkway connecting the containment room with the Gate chamber beyond. "No!" Jayhawk snarled aloud, and clamped down on system resources, denying the intruder--God help her if it wasn't Caroline--purchase on her system. After a short, sharp struggle, the tugging subsided. Almost instantly it began again on another connector, the delicate cobweb bridge between the CPU and sector 2. Again she fended it off, wincing at the glitter of stress-lights across the CPU. And again, and again. The attacker was *not* going to get the better of her. She didn't tire, and she wouldn't relent. Anubis was hers, and neither Caroline nor anyone else was going to damage it this way. -- Caroline stamped her foot in frustration, balked. She could visualize her pulling machine, start it going, but almost instantly it would come to a stop, as if some intangible gear had jammed. She'd tried attacking different bridges, using different approaches--even the difficult intellectual trick of visualizing two machines at once, pulling on two separate bridges. Nothing worked. She had a vague sense that she was being blocked deliberately. By Jayhawk? She frowned at the thought. More pleasing to assume that Lefty or another of the Paradisians was responsible. In that case, maybe she needed backing from Jay and Anubis. Either way, the thought nagged at her until at last she gave up on her futile bridge-pulling, tried to will herself back to the system. She found herself in the CPU, Jayhawk staring at her, blade drawn. One look at Jay's expression made it quite clear who had been blocking her; Caroline took an instinctive step backward, hand going to the hilt of her own lightblade, then forced it away. A flicker of overwatch showed her what had happened to the system: the delicate outer nodes were braced with new connectors, perfectly in the style of the rest of Anubis but still jarringly inesthetic, while the connection to the Gate complex was...different. Not obviously so, she couldn't define what had changed, but it was not quite made of the same materials as the rest of the system. It might have felt good, might even have seemed an improvement, if it hadn't been subtly but noticably dissonant with everything else. Swallowing her pride, she said at last, "I'm sorry, I didn't realize it would have that effect; I thought the island-computer was inactive." "Apparently not," said Jayhawk in a toneless voice. Hearing her, Caroline knew already that the arguments she had been marshalling for why she should be allowed to continue were futile. *When I created you, my intent was to safeguard the system, and myself, and you. I didn't know then that I'd ever want to change it.* The transformed connection nagged at her like an unfulfilled promise, a promise of power and knowledge. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 42006 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!samsung!uunet!zephyr.ens.tek.com!uw-beaver!milton!phylo.genetics.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 63 Message-ID: <1991Jun25.171454.27380@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 25 Jun 91 17:14:54 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 137 63. Minerva As Caroline had expected, it was futile to argue with Jayhawk. Jay pointed out, rather forcefully, that even if Anubis could somehow survive the repeated stresses, simply maintaining system integrity in the face of the mismatched connector was using up a full 1% of available resources. Furthermore, she added, there were over 100 connectors in Anubis. The system would hang before Caroline's scheme could be completed. Caroline had no answer to that, beyond an intuitive feeling that it wasn't so. Jayhawk refused to trust her intuition. She could hardly blame her; she wasn't entirely sure about it herself. "What am I supposed to do, then? That's my best idea!" she protested. "Find a better one," said Jayhawk harshly. "Use some of the power you've already got. You told the hawk you were going to free people. If you could free Martha, that would be a good start towards finding out what we need to know." "How?" "*I* don't know. Maybe looking at her will tell you something. Maybe you can trick it out of her. Quit moping and do something! Go ask Chalker his opinion!" Caroline shuddered. She'd dealt with Chalker and his ghosts once, and had little desire to do it again. "All right. Send me back to the Matrix, and I'll see what I can do." Back at Osiris, she sent Martha a message asking to talk with her, then considered her immediate options. How good of a decker was she, now? She had very little idea. Could she run the Paradisian satellite systems, pry their secrets out that way? Could she run the High Temple itself? That didn't seem too likely. How could she find out without getting caught? The Paradisian base in Seattle was empty, had been since their raid on it months ago; but its computer was still up, or had been last time she'd checked. What better way to test her abilities? There might even be information there. It had been Aliantha's system, after all. From the outside, the system appeared much as it always had, a high-walled castle with heavily barred gates. She went around to the "back", the peculiar third SAN by which she and Yoichi had entered it the first time. It was still there, a break in the walls blocked by no more than a thorny hedge with a closed gate in it. As she recalled from her last trip, this and the node behind it were 'dead'--some damage to the computer had deactivated them. They should have been non-existent. Duende had guessed that the Gate was somehow supporting them. They were still dead on the Matrix, but she could see activity on another level, one for which she had no name. It was eerie. The hedge didn't resist her when she pushed through it, only tingled along her skin. With no computer supporting it, the IC was long gone. She walked along the pebbled path, noticed that it had changed; it was dimpled with large, oblong depressions at regular intervals. Footprints, perhaps. At the crossroads they turned off in both directions, though there had seemed to be only one line of them. She took the branch that had led to the isolation field and Gate chamber, curious whether she would be able to get past it. As before, the isolation field appeared as a jagged chasm cutting across the road. On the Matrix she could see the folded-up bridge on the far side, inoperable without a hardware switch, the last line of defense against enemies trying to seize the Gate from either side. But she could also see a thin span of stone, without railings, arching across the gap. Not a Matrix construct, though she could put no better name to it. Memories of flight nerved her to walk across. As she stepped on the keystone of the arch the bridge trembled slightly; a faint echo like distant thunder answered from somewhere beyond the chasm. She hurridly finished the crossing, looked about. Empty road under a desolate sky. No; far off on the unturning road was a tiny black speck, moving toward her. She drew her blade, squinting at it-- And it was on her, impossibly fast; an opaque shadow like a cloud of flies, though the individual units moved so quickly that they blended together. Three arms coalesced from its seething mass, reached out for her. The mass itself *lifted*, brushing along the interface between the Matrix and the Overnet, rippling its surface. Drinking in power, she thought as she fended off the arms, sliced through one to leave it dissipating in the air. It had a vile acrid smell, somehow familiar. It struck at her again, more solidly this time; three talons pinched inward, seized her below the ribs. Suddenly she did recognize them; the three-fingered hand of a Minerva vector, Aliantha's deadly experiment. One sunk into her body, burning coldly, even as she beat the other two back. She screamed, tried to detach herself from the Matrix, return to the feather-garden--it was the easiest target, easier than Anubis from here. Blocked, anchored by its grasping claws. Something was probing into her-- It released her suddenly, drew back as if alarmed. Before it could move again she was gone. She found herself on the CPU-island, immersed in brilliant sunlight. With stumbling haste she threw herself into the pool, scrubbed at her body. There were deep bruises under the armor, but no punctures. She felt violated, worse than when Channa had mindprobed her; the attacker hadn't just been searching her thoughts, it had wanted to change them. Why had it drawn back? Because she was too powerful for it? Or because it had recognized her, knew her as someone it had already marked? She remembered the dreams at the High Temple. She collected herself with an effort, returned to Anubis. *Jayhawk* was free, even if she wasn't; and might be in danger as a result. Afraid, once again, to put herself in reach of the system controls, she sat in a test chamber in sector 3 while Jayhawk ran tests and described what had happened. There had been two attempts to break into the system. The first had come from outside, through SAN 2; the IC had driven it off before Jayhawk could get a good look. The second had come up through Caroline's personal datastore, where her decking code was kept; meeting no IC there, it had ransacked the datastore, then tried to gain access to the CPU. A guardian daemon had driven it away. Jayhawk described a black cloud, almost too fast to see. "You're clean as far as I can tell," said Jayhawk at last. "Do you know any differently?" There was a distinct edge to her voice. "No. No, I don't." She touched the slowly fading bruise along her side. It had wanted information; and control. Apparently Jayhawk had denied it control, but what would it do with the information? "I need better decking code before I run into that again." Jayhawk nodded sharply. "I'll work on it. You have an appointment with Martha to keep." *I'm afraid to go back.* She bit back the words, nodded. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 42007 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!swrinde!mips!cs.uoregon.edu!milton!phylo.genetics.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 64 Message-ID: <1991Jun25.171719.28043@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 25 Jun 91 17:17:19 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 241 64. Megan Martha parked her motorcycle just inside the SAN at Osiris, found Caroline waiting for her. The decker was almost ghostly--not transparent, but attenuated, color leached out of her skin and hair, fragile and somehow incomplete. Half-glimpsed images which Martha couldn't identify flickered in the shadows of her hair, the folds of her clothing. Touch more than vision said that she was not a ghost; there was a glow about her, like sunlight on Martha's face. She was both warmed and saddened. Aliantha had been like that. "Hello, Martha. What's up?" Caroline said exuberantly. "Hello! Busy as usual, I'm afraid--two alarms this morning, probably five more this afternoon, you'd think the whole place was going to fall apart.--It's good to see you looking more cheerful." She wasn't at all sure it was sincere. "How are things with you?" "Coming along. Did you get my previous letter?" There was a bit of an edge to the smile now. "Yes, I got it. I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to reply." "Any comments on the situation now?" Still smiling, but through almost clenched lips. "No, I'm afraid not." "Any news from down there at all?" "Things are coming along." She smiled back at Caroline, wearily. "People are keeping busy, trying to fill in the gaps." The decker stared at her, hard-eyed. She would have liked so much to satisfy her, if only she had any idea what to say, but if Caroline couldn't ask.... "We aren't fooling anybody, you know." "If you'd like to be more blunt, go right ahead," said Caroline stiffly. "I'd be delighted to hear anything you have to say." Martha climbed off the bike, leaned back against it. What could she tell her? "You've surprised a lot of people, did you know that? I thought you might find it encouraging." "Good." "Did you, ah, use the darts? Did they work properly?" "I used one, and it worked fine; thanks. I can see why you don't have a whole lot of those. I'm afraid Jayhawk didn't approve, though." "So it really is you and Jayhawk now, isn't it?" So much like Aliantha. Caroline hesitated an instant, then nodded. Was that the final answer? Martha wanted to ask, but she was afraid that Caroline would resent the question, or misunderstand it. "What didn't she approve of?" she said at last. "She was worried about structural integrity; and system security." "I can see how she might feel that way...." She gathered her courage, plunged into it: "I'd urge you to keep in touch with people. Don't let yourself become isolated. I think that's how Aliantha went wrong." "Oh? What did she do?" "Let herself slip....In some ways you remind me of her very much." Images flickered behind Caroline's eyes, as if watching her. "I've been trying to rid myself of that idea; haven't had much success either." There was something in her voice that said *but it doesn't matter now*. "There's a lot of Aliantha in Jayhawk, in you...a lot of Megan..." She found herself confused, the easy correspondances suddenly not so clear. Perhaps there was a chance for Caroline after all. "I really hope you won't choose her path." "That's what he said, but it's not very helpful advice since I don't know what she did." "*He* talked to you about Aliantha?" She was shocked. "Wrong 'he'. Lefty, I mean. He's been hanging about a good deal, pretending to be other people." Something about that matter-of-fact statement disturbed her intensely. She tried to hide the reaction, wasn't sure she was succeeding. "I'm sorry. I remember when we first found him, he couldn't have been more than eight or nine years old, but there was already such an edge to him, so much energy...." "So what did Aliantha do?" "What do you want to know, exactly?" She realized that she was infuriating Caroline, but hedging had become such an ingrained habit....And the less she told her about Aliantha, the more likely that she and Jayhawk would find another answer, a better one. "Everyone keeps telling me not to follow Aliantha's path! I haven't the faintest idea what that is, so how can I follow it or not? If you think ignorance is going to keep me from doing anything, you're *wrong*." She was almost shouting. Martha's skin tingled where she was facing her, as if with gathering storm. "Aliantha and Megan were two different people." She struggled to put it in words. "There was a kind of spark in Aliantha, a brightness; but she gave it up. Sacrificed it, I think. There's a lot of power in losing that ...that connection to people, to the world....But it's not worth it, Caroline. No amount of power is worth that." "What happened to Megan?" "I think she just gave up. I talked to her near the end. She'd taken in some power, I don't know exactly what it was, but it was too much for her; it was burning her up from inside. She told me that she didn't think she could hold on here much longer, and anyway she was tired; she just wanted to let it all slide. And then she died. When your body died, I thought....but you're all right, and Jayhawk is--she is all right, isn't she?" "Yes.--What happened to my body, exactly?" Didn't she know? What was she asking? "It died...." "I know that, I was there. I mean, how? I can't really imagine it." "There were a lot of flashing lights and alarms....I don't know what else to say." At least it had been quick, quicker than what happened to Megan. She was grateful not to have had to go through that again. "Why are you willing to keep doing this again and again, if it ends like that?" A hard question, one that tempted her to thoughts she really couldn't afford. "Why? For the sake of people like Slim, and Charlotte, and Roth....And I have a job to do, and that still matters to me. Or maybe it's just that I'm not young anymore, and I've been tangled up in this for so long...sometimes I'm not sure how much is left of me." More than she had meant to say; but perhaps Caroline would understand. "You're not *that* old. This is the Matrix, anyway, what difference does it make? Martha, are we private?" Martha had to chuckle at that. "This is the Matrix; it's as private as we make it." She ran a pro-forma scan, already sure what the answer would be. "Yes, we are." As private as it gets. Caroline walked around her, leaned against the doorway of the SAN as if to block Martha's escape. Slowly and carefully, eyes probing hers, she said, "Would you be disentangled if you could?" The hairs on the back of her neck prickled. It was not a question, she sensed. It was an offer. Analysis code probed at her. With an effort, she refrained from blocking it. Let Caroline find out what she could, painful though she found it to have her weaknesses exposed. Perhaps it would help.... As honestly as she dared, picking her way through the mines: "I don't know. When I think about what I've lost...but then I think about what I would lose, and I--I really don't know, Caroline." "You should make up your mind." "I suppose I should." She shivered. "--You've changed, do you know that?" "So have you." *That* she definitely could not discuss. She cast about for another topic, remembered a long-ago conversation with Aliantha. "Have you started sleeping?" Caroline hesitated, clearly unsure whether to answer. "Not here." "Not here?--Aliantha had a place that she went to where I could never follow her. A kind of refuge, I think. After a while she stopped going there. I guess she didn't need it anymore." "Or she thought she didn't." Was that a hint of sympathy? "Yes. What's it like, this place of yours?" "Feathery." "Feathery?" she repeated in startlement. Having seen Anubis, she was amazed that Caroline's domain contained anything even vaguely biological. "Overwhelmingly feathery." Martha tried to smile at her, pained by the mistrust, the hardness of her eyes. "Feathery, that's a good word for how you look now...so bright.... Things will have changed for you, with your life gathered about you like that. If you feel the need to sleep, you shouldn't fight it. I think that was one of her mistakes." "I'll bear that in mind. Martha, what is he trying to accomplish, doing this over and over?" "You're only the second one." Caroline's eyes widened, obviously surprised and, Martha judged, pleased. "I thought there were a substantial number of High Priests." "There are, but not like you and Aliantha." "Multiple different experiments?" she said, in a voice somewhere between curiosity and horror. "Most of the High Priests aren't experiments at all; just people who wanted power, or magic, or knowledge." She shook her head wearily, thinking of Merrow. Suddenly a twinge went through her, sharp and impatient. She was back on the bike almost before she realized what was happening. It was worse than before, worse than she had imagined. "Caroline, I really have to go; I won't be able to do this too many more times....Take care of yourself." The frustrated curiosity in Caroline's eyes tore at her, but not half as much as the tugging from within. Caroline spread her arms, blocking the SAN exit, and said in a level voice, "What would I have to do to get a good long talk with you?" "I don't know. Heal *him*, maybe." She could hear the pleading in her own voice, closer to the surface than she had intended. "Or destroy.... No, that's not possible." She wasn't totally sure; and she didn't know whether she wanted to be right or wrong. She *had* to go.... "That question I asked you? If you ever figure out the answer, I'd like very much to hear it." Caroline moved aside, let her pass. She flung herself out the gate, barely managed to say over her shoulder, "So would I. Goodbye, Caroline." Barely heard the response, falling from the Matrix like a star into the sea: "Goodbye, Martha. Take care." -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 42289 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!caen!dali.cs.montana.edu!milton!phylo.genetics.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 65 Message-ID: <1991Jun28.011120.29105@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 28 Jun 91 01:11:20 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@phylo.edu.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 57 65. Background To kill time before her date with Michael, Caroline decided to try to find out whether Angela had been a real person. She began with the on-line telephone and class records, and was startled to find that Angela Whitechapel appeared in both, registered for the classes Caroline remembered taking in the stim-illusion, living in the apartment she recalled. She hadn't attended any classes for two weeks. Dismayed, she dug deeper. Angela was *real*? They'd admitted a stranger into Anubis, offered her their protection? Police records told her that Angela was listed as having disappeared on the evening of the theater performance. Her boyfriend Mark had been taken in for questioning, but no charges had been brought and the case was apparently inactive. People disappeared in Seattle every week. Caroline sifted through camera records from Angela's apartment building, found a couple of images of Mark--apparently he'd found a new girlfriend. No pictures of Angela, but the camera buffers were flushed weekly. Her bank account was real and fairly large, though there was a lock on it. Caroline might have broken it with work, if she'd had any use for money. Real grades in the University records, real email piling up in her computer account. Caroline read it, baffled. It was unhelpful, mainly class announcements and advertising. There was something deeply disturbing about the idea that Angela might have been a real, distinct person, a stranger with a life and identity of her own. What had they done to her? What had they done to *themselves*, dealing with her as they had? Caroline searched her memories, recalled sending in a job application-- she/Angela had been desperate for any approach to the Matrix, even a scutwork computer job. She broke into the company's files, searched through job listings. The job was real enough--still open, in fact, contrary to Angela's despondant impression that it would be filled instantly by someone far more qualified than she. But Angela's application wasn't on file anywhere. Caroline paced the records datastore, wondering. Perhaps Angela wasn't real at all, but a clever fake put together by the Paradisians. After all, they'd only have to doctor Matrix records, and they were surely capable of that. For the first time, her freedom on the Matrix seemed restrictive. Perhaps she had reason to manifest after all. But she sensed that she might be able to do that only a very few times, and she didn't want to waste them. Evening came while she was still searching; at last she gave up, went to meet Michael. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 42290 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!dali.cs.montana.edu!milton!phylo.genetics.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 66 Message-ID: <1991Jun28.011239.29270@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 28 Jun 91 01:12:39 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 123 66. Lightning Caroline spent the evening with Michael, admiring his new Matrix image-- a slim tousle-haired boy on a floating skateboard, far handsomer than the robot had been--and his new job, Matrix watchdog on an elegantly Japanese system in downtown Seattle. There was black IC, killcode, on one of its nodes, a flicker of overwatch showed her. She mentioned it to him only when they were elsewhere, wandering the complexities of the downtown web. "There *is*? How do you know?" His eyes were wide. "I wonder, um, if I'm really working for the Yaks. I mean, it's a lot of money, with the cyberware and all." He was distinctly faster, though still no match for her. "Do you think so?" "It's possible. I could try to find out, if you like, though obviously there's some risk--more to you than to me." He considered that for a minute. "No, if I'm going to find out I should do it myself, the way a real decker would, and run my own risks." She nodded approval. "If you end up running it, I can tell you one thing--black's no worse than any other IC, except it hurts a lot more if you miss. If you can beat it, you can beat it, and it doesn't matter what it was trying to do. Keep that in mind and you won't psych yourself out so bad. And always have someone around in realspace, so they can get you to a hospital if something goes wrong." She wished she had that luxury. They ran the fringers of the entertainment district, systems contorted into lurid shapes of neon and glass, pulsing with traffic. Michael talked about his ambitions for the future, about wanting to *be* Forked Lightning--one of the names other deckers conjured by, like Fastjack, like the Silver Sliver, like (he blushed a little) *her*. His ideas about how to do this were rather vague and unformed, though no worse, she thought, than her own ideas about defeating Paradisio.... She asked him if he would talk to Angela's instructors, find out if any of them remembered her. Real people might be harder to fake than electronic records. He agreed at once, apparently finding something glamorous in the detective work. She didn't explain who Angela was, only that she might or might not have been a real person. She spun the night out until nearly dawn, finding that she didn't want to leave. A seed of a plan, an argument for Jayhawk, was beginning to germinate in the back of her mind, but she didn't want to look at it yet. And Martha had urged her not to give up human companionship. Martha's advice might be suspect, but her own intuition concurred. She and Jayhawk were many things to one another, but not...not quite friends. "I'm going to have to do something rather rash," she said at last. "I'm scared half to death; I don't know if I'm going to be coming back. I wanted you to know I've really enjoyed your company." "Not coming back? You can't do that! How am I ever going to learn all your secrets?" His tone was more than half serious. "Don't talk like that. You'll be fine, you're too damn good to die." "It's not dying I'm really worried about." She remembered being saved by Jayhawk, the feeling of effortless strength enfolding her. She wasn't sure she *could* die, if Jayhawk didn't wish her to. A good feeling, on the whole. "I don't want to end up working for the people I'm running against." "You? Punch a time clock? Never!" "I hope not." She looked up at the shadowy sky. "I...I have a sort of present for you, if you'd like." He looked at her in puzzlement, then smiled suddenly. "Sure!" She held out one hand to him. "Hold on tight, and don't let go." He took her hand gingerly. She took a deep breath--I hope this works, it's going to be damned embarrassing if it doesn't--and lifted them toward the greyness overhead. For a moment the Matrix spread about them, alive with the city's endless dataflow. Then exhaustion caught her, and she had to let them fall. They landed with a soft bounce; she sat down heavily, panting. Michael stared at her open-mouthed. "How did you do that?" After a moment, with obvious regret: "No, I guess I shouldn't ask." "Ask anything you like," she said between gasps. "Tonight I don't care. Whew! That was harder than I thought it would be." "How did you do it?" He sat down in front of her, skateboard propped against him. She tried to explain the little she knew--not telling him the story, but laying out the fragments of Overnet theory she'd been able to glean from the Paradisian records and her own experience. "That's the best I can do," she said after many questions. "Forked Lightning, if you ever meet anyone else who can do that--keep shy of them. As far as I know there's only the people that taught me, and they're--" Words failed her. "You don't want to get mixed up with them." "Take care of yourself," he said fiercely. "Now you've *got* to come back." He followed her covertly when she'd made her goodbyes. She decided not to shake him, though she easily could have done so. Let him see, if he really wanted to. When she was clear of the node where she'd left him, she spread her arms, stepped through to the clear sky above the islands. For an instant she had considered taking him with her. But though she knew she could do it, he would be changed in the transition, and so would the place to which she brought him. Changed perhaps beyond recognition. She wouldn't risk that. It was early morning, still and warm. She spiralled down to the central island, curled up among the feathers. Once again Martha's advice seemed good; she *could* sleep, odd as it seemed, and it felt right to do so. She could forsee a bitter argument with Jayhawk. Best that she have all her resources about her, for that. And it was safe here, safer even than Anubis. She was so tired of being afraid. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 42525 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!usc!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!cs.uoregon.edu!milton!phylo.genetics.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 67 Message-ID: <1991Jul1.210549.2853@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 1 Jul 91 21:05:49 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 219 67. Egg "I know what the islands are for," said Caroline to Jayhawk, sitting with her in their personal node. "I can't be attuned to Anubis without unmaking the entire system and remaking it. From here, there's no way to do that without destroying--" She waved a hand at the splendor around them. "I can do it there, one piece at a time." "And where will that leave me?" said Jayhawk softly. "It's a single- user system, you know. I would be very surprised if you could attune it to you without taking it from me. I'm not even sure I would live." She reached out, put a finger over Caroline's mouth as she tried to reply. "I know that's not your intention. I even know how to do this without killing either of us. But I have some serious concerns that have to be addressed first." One finger raised. "You have to show me how Anubis can keep running at 112% of maximum capacity." A second. "You have to convince me that the egg in the CPU isn't going to corrupt whatever we do." A third. "And you have to convince me that *you* won't bring coercion with you. Anubis is mine, and it's free of influence--I *know* that. You...I'm not sure I know anymore." "How?" said Caroline breathlessly. "I mean, how are you going to do it?" Jayhawk took a small bundle from her belt; it unfolded in her hands to a slender, ornate circlet of braided silver wire. Caroline recognized it, though it had been considerably modified since she had last seen it. It was the code she and Kurt had written to explore the dead nodes. Run in an active system, they had found, it would merge the decker's thoughts with the machine's. "If I am bound to Anubis," said Jayhawk, "you won't be able to change it without changing me; you won't be able to attune yourself to it without accepting me. And I'll have the system to support me. I don't think you're strong enough to break us." "Or vice versa?" "I made Anubis--" She seemed to catch Caroline's reaction, corrected herself. "We made Anubis to be ours; that's its nature." Caroline wrapped her arms around herself, caught between desire and fear. "Would you really do that?" She wasn't at all sure that she would, if the posititions were reversed. At the Hidden Fortress Kurt had pulled her out of the merger. Here, with no physical body, no telecom link to break, there would be no escape if her own will was not enough; and at the Hidden Fortress escape had never even occured to her, a concept foreign to the machine. Having tasted freedom, she wasn't ready to give it up, even to possess Anubis. And the thought of letting someone else change her.... "Figure out those questions," said Jayhawk harshly. "Then we'll talk about it." The nature of the egg sleeping in the CPU seemed the most accessable of the questions. They worked together on probe code, eventually puzzled out a method of seeing within its defenses. The program that was causing Anubis' CPU to respond sluggishly proved to be an immense simulation, in at least three dimensions, of what looked a good deal like a game of Life. There was some kind of random or pseudorandom element, cells that filled suddenly for no apparent reason. It was huge, easily a billion cells on a side. Jayhawk said aloud, "It's tying up my CPU with *this*?" She flung a representation of the game across one of the interior CPU surfaces, glared at it. Digging into old memories of comp theory courses, Caroline said, "As I recall, that game's complex enough to make a Turing machine in, which means it can function as a computer. Pretty good way to hide what it's doing, since we don't understand its internal representations." Jayhawk ran one hand along the smooth panel, frowned. "It's *fighting* me. Pretty damn strong, too. Ah! There we go." Cells flared into life, dot-matrix letters: HEY! WHAT ARE YOU DOING? "Let's see if it can read." The letters began to mutate and drift outwards, rapidly becoming unrecognizable. Caroline could sense that beneath her flippancy Jayhawk was furiously angry. "How is it resisting?" "Passively," the other bit off. "Not even bothering to raise actual defenses. If it wanted to...." There was fear as well as anger in her voice. "Caroline, this thing is 'beneath' us in the CPU. What's beneath the middle island in your garden?" "The chamber where Lefty talked to me." "Can you get at it there, maybe find out more?" A sudden shock went through both of them, a realization that something had changed. Jayhawk leaned over the simulation image, peering into it. "The wavefront from our message hit something, I think." Cells flickered and moved beneath her as Caroline ran over to look. The wave was propagating back inward now. "I've got this on record, in case it happens really fast." But no words appeared, only a cascade of gliders. "Maybe that *is* your answer," said Caroline. "'What am I doing? Playing Life, silly.'" "With my machine," said Jayhawk without looking up. "Go find out why." The garden was easy to reach from here, a matter of a single step. Sunlight flared around her, startling after Anubis' darkness. She settled on the central island, closed her eyes and tried to visualize the brick chamber beneath. The sunlight on her eyelids faded, and she could see darkness, the faint golden gleam of the wheel. The chamber seemed empty, almost unnaturally so, a vacancy in the solid earth like a cavity in a tooth. Beneath it--her senses balked. But there was something there. Not an entity, but a place.... She visualized the wheel, unscrewed it. The water in the pool began to drop rapidly, a spinning whirlpool forming over the hole. She lifted herself into the air, hovered over it. Intuition told her that the only way to reach the other place, through the solid brick of the chamber floor, was in a headlong dive from high above. She tried not to think about hitting the floor. The last of the water ran out. She collected herself, dove down through the narrow hatchway, into the tingling cold of the water. No holding back, no reckoning with stone-hard brick....Something tugged at her briefly, and then she was flying, winging through grey nothingness. Anubis spun slowly beneath her, tethered to the greater bulk of Ares Macrotech. She was free in the Overnet. Unguessable depths opened beneath her, tempting and terrifying. She landed at SAN 2, found that the IC was down, the system frozen. Jayhawk was in the CPU, dangling forlornly from a webstrand. She looked up as Caroline entered. "Cute. Did *you* hang us? From the garden?" "I'm afraid so. I had to let the water out." "Keep that in mind, if someone else ever gets in control. You took out 90% of our processor power. What's left isn't enough--we're in timeshare; I don't know why we can talk to each other, unless the egg makes the necessary third party. You could screw someone up good that way." "I'll fix it," said Caroline hastily, and returned to the garden. She called the water back, watched it frothing up from below until the pool was full. *So Anubis and this place are directly linked now. That wasn't the case before. Interesting.* She flew into the forest, looking for the great tree and its standing stones, but there was no other break in the canopy. She tried flying with closed eyes, letting intuition guide her; she didn't run into a tree, rather to her surprise, but she got nowhere. It was tiring, too; flight was natural to her, but not at such a slow pace. No. She wasn't going to reach the clearing this way. It was elsewhere, distant as the Matrix--and she *could* reach it, but there would be a price, a heavy one. It was something not to be done except in desperation. *How do I know?* She considered trying it, decided against it. She didn't want the Hawk's answers; she wanted her own. Returning to Anubis, she found it alive once more. "Good," said Jayhawk, not looking up from her monitors. "Any luck?" "There's nothing there," said Caroline with certainty, "except a Gate to the Overnet. No egg.--Unless the egg the Hawk showed me...." She winced at Jayhawk's expression. "Jay, what's the worst case here? What specifically are we afraid of?" "Dragon egg," said Jayhawk shortly. "Or maybe the next step in Aliantha's self-initiation. I'm not sure which is worse." Caroline had thought of the first idea, but not the second. Death was a gateway, Ratty had told her once. Might Aliantha have passed through deliberately, yet another step on the journey of power? (Would I do that?) Disturbed, she looked around at the monitors. Jayhawk had called up the code she'd once written to communicate with ghosts, was running it repetitively in background, the same message encoded over and over again in different representations: PLEASE TALK TO ME. "No luck here," said Jayhawk. "Caroline, can you anchor me so that if it tries to take me I can draw on your support? *Without* forcing the merger?" Caroline reached out a tentative hand, laid it on Jayhawk's shoulder. "I think so," she said cautiously. She could feel the other's presence, a cool tingle. "I might get caught, though--between letting you go and merging with you--if it were too strong...." She knew which she would choose, madness or no. "Here's a program," said Jayhawk briskly, "to keep a ten-second timer and transmit a general wakeup at the end of it. I couldn't find a way to time the Kurt code itself, so this will have to do. And here's a commlink, the best I could manage--don't know if it'll work, not when I'm *there*, but it's worth a try. Ten seconds. Time me yourself, too. I don't entirely trust the system clock, and you seem somewhat independent." She looked up at Caroline. "Remember you can hang the system, if you have to." Caroline took the programs--a bit of silver to slip behind her ear, a delicate bell attached--and settled herself at the main console. She wanted to argue with Jayhawk, suggest a different line of approach, but she didn't have any answers to offer. Jayhawk took the silver circlet from her belt, nestled it into her hair. For an instant she stood frozen, a puzzled expression on her face. Then she settled into the floor of the CPU like water seeping into the earth. Caroline counted aloud, her voice the only sound in the emptiness of the machine. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 42712 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!cs.uoregon.edu!milton!phylo.genetics.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 68 Message-ID: <1991Jul5.232454.17278@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 5 Jul 91 23:24:54 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 233 68. Anubis For an instant after Jayhawk activated the interface code nothing happened. She had time to wonder--What am I doing, anyway? I'm already here, why do I expect this to change anything? Then she was falling, patterns spread out around her like the city seen from above, like Caroline's descriptions of the Matrix. Three-dimensional patterns, a cloud of information, constantly changing. She could almost grasp their meaning, almost... The Life-game's program was enclosed in a huge process, maintaining a region of protected memory for it, shielding it from interference. She traced its root down, wondering. It ran deep, beyond her perceptions, a single thick strand of information. A tingle went through her; vision faded as her awareness reached out, currents of thought spreading through the system. Where the nodes linked, interference patterns formed, standing waves reflecting herself back to herself, to the focus point in the center. Awareness of that, too, faded, the individual nodes lost in their interplay, in the totality of the system. She struggled for analogy. She was beneath the Life-game process, curled around the strand that supported it, feeling its strength. It didn't branch at all within her reach. Beneath her, the echoes of her perception grew weaker and weaker, but as far as she could follow the process continued downwards. It seemed to her that she/Jayhawk had created it; it had that feel--not integral, but compatible. Nothing but the partition protected the Life-game. Its programming was more complex than she had realized, but it offered no independent resistance; it seemed to her that she could destroy it if she chose. She remembered struggling with Aliantha in the SPU at the Hidden Fortress. Compared to Aliantha, the Life-game would be easy to encapsulate, feeding power into its own defenses, cutting it off from system resources. Or did that extension downwards provide it access? Groping for comparison, she found the code that supported Jayhawk's existence. It was finer-grained than the Life-game, a complex network interpenetrating with the latticework of the CPU, extending downwards as a cluster of branching processes rather than a single strand. Constantly moving, shifting, a small reflection of the system's life. There was something lacking there, though she couldn't immediately identify the missing element. She considered the code from all sides, trying to find a change that would improve it. Her perception of the lack was indirect, metaphorical--hollowness in the gut, an unfulfilled craving, frustrated tingling in the fingertips, aching in the jaws. She could find no way to translate that metaphor into concrete improvements. Essential information was missing. *Caroline.* She could sense the other as a weight in the CPU, a slight distortion of the continual dataflow. Nothing more. If the information was there, it was not accessable to her now. Having realized that, she went back to her consideration of the Life-game. Past time was open to her, though the echoes of her awareness were limited by the stored information; as she reached out toward the origin of the system, the signal became weaker, less complete. The Life-game process had its origin at the moment when full operation was restored after the time-share the fetus had forced on her. Its creation marked a tremendous discontinuity in system operations. No process currently running extended before that point. Everything that had been running had terminated. For some period of time, unknown because unrecorded, she had not existed. It was a disturbing thought. She considered earlier times, trying to probe into the reasons for the shutdown. Amidst the normal interplay of system processes, six unusual traces had entered the timeshare. One could easily be identified as herself/Jayhawk by its relationship with stored programs and IC. One, older, was probably Caroline's interface with the system. A third definitely represented the fetus. She explored its takeover of sector 1, the proliferation of subprocesses it spawned in its attempt to control Caroline. The tracks of her/Jayhawk's resistance were clear. She noted ways in which she could improve her methods of attack. The remaining three processes originated in sector 1 slightly before the imposition of timeshare. They were a cascade, the first spawning the second, which spawned the third. Only the third terminated normally, at a point during the timeshare which she was able to identify as the moment when she/Jayhawk had touched Angela, felt the system respond for a brief instant, then relapse into its hung state. The other two, like the traces of herself, Caroline, the fetus, terminated abnormally at the moment of discontinuity when Piebald and Angela had touched each other. A process which corresponded with her/Jayhawk originated immediately afterwards, continued until four seconds ago. She wondered how it had been restarted. The discontinuity itself was invisible to her, and Jayhawk's memories were little help. She wished for Caroline's. Her perception of the past was too thin to identify the cascade processes. She experimented with increased logging--useless now, but perhaps it would prove itself in the future--and was disappointed. It drew too great a share of system resources. She was not organized to deny access from within; she had been created (created herself?) for a single focus of control, not the elaborate cross-checking of a multi-user system. The lack of efficiency was dissatisfying. She probed more deeply into it, found an annoying roughness in one part of herself, the connector between the CPU and node 0-1. The interface between nodes and connector--which should have been seamless, not even felt unless directly examined--was jagged and uneven. She couldn't improve matters without undoing Caroline's work. She considered that. Could she maintain system operations if more and more connectors became mismatched? Experimentation suggested she could, using her own attention and resources to smooth over the gaps. She would have to attend to them continually. But if the final step restored the system's unity, converting it all to the other pattern of operation....It could be done. The changes were acceptable to her, for power: to prevent further intrusions, to protect herself, perhaps to grow. Something brushed against her, a change in the everchanging flow. A breach had been opened in the Life-game partition from within, and elements of the game were propagating outwards. She would not destroy them unless forced, bound by her/Jayhawk's pledge to Angela and Piebald. She watched carefully, tracing out the accesses that the game-elements were using, marshalling her resources to encapsulate them if necessary. The game reached out a long tendril, established a connection with the datastore at 2-6, Caroline's personal records. Somehow it moved *beneath* the IC she had put on that node--she probed further, found a shadowy sub-node beneath the normally accessable one. The two were linked at their centers, beyond the radius of operation of the IC. It reminded her of things that Caroline had done from the Matrix--creating a new Matrix node by duplicating a system component, linking them together for power and support. A message was transmitted to her, across the interface between its representation and her own, mediated by the ghost-translation code: *Hey! What are you doing? Please talk to me.* The encoding was very similar to what she/Jayhawk and Caroline had used, but narrower, less powerful. *I am trying to find out about you. Who are you?* It seemed appropriate to tell the Life-process who she was, but she had difficulty finding a formulation. *I am Jayhawk@Anubis.* It did not respond immediately. She observed its datastore manipulations, tried to devise a way to cut off its access if she should need to do so. It was a difficult problem. Caroline had some of the information she needed, she decided after nearly a second. *I am...@Anubis.* *What are you doing?* she responded at once. System load climbed. She decided on a cutoff: if it exeeded 90% of maximum she would restrict it. While she waited for a reply, she put safeguards in place to make the cutoff smooth and certain. *Growing. Learning.* *Do you have a name/identifier?* A process signalled her: her ten second period had passed. She briefly considered, and rejected, leaving the CPU, interrupting the conversation. While she waited, she devised a program to do internal monitoring in crisis periods, carefully buffering it so that it wouldn't contribute to load if system capacity were approached. She was not entirely satisfied with its elegance, but it seemed to be the best she could do within current constraints. Perhaps Caroline's plan would remove some of her limitations. *@star*, it said. *Caroline?* It was searching for graphics code. She packaged a group of routines from Caroline's Matrix code, passed them to it. Its external searches dropped, but system load rose dangerously. She passed it a bundle of indicators. *Don't put the system over 90%.* There was no way to free up more resources without dropping security processes, which she would not do. She put safeguards on critical IC and daemons, protecting herself from attempts by the game to terminate them. *Too inefficient for now. Talk to you later.* The intrusive code unwound itself from the datastores, retreated within its partition. A trailing fringe brushed her. *Isn't this neat! Bye!* The flavor of the communication was distinctly different, tags on it she associated with Piebald. She had no record of Piebald's system interactions for comparison, only her/Jayhawk's conversations with him, but the impression was quite strong. The partitioning was clean, nothing left running in unprotected space. She set a daemon to monitor the Life-game process, signal her if it violated its boundaries again. Another signal reached her, a message from a different level of the CPU. *Jayhawk! Your ten seconds are up!* Everything seemed to be in order. She made certain of it, then set herself to the task of manifestation. It was a difficult one. Her consciousness was distributed throughout the system; gathering it together at one point--even the CPU--broke connections, weakened her control. She could do it, but it was unnatural and painful. And the form which she was trying to take couldn't contain her in her entirety; she had to limit herself, sacrifice capabilities and modes of perception, become less than she was. She considered creating a simulacrum, remaining where she was but acting through a Matrix image. It could be done, and she might try it in the future. But Caroline was waiting for her, and it seemed to her that Caroline would know the difference. She forced the transition, an instant of startling pain. Jayhawk found herself standing dizzily in the center of the CPU, in a form that for a moment felt wildly wrong and unnatural, a straightjacket of Matrix imagery. She had a hazy impression of a vast slowdown in her thoughts, a crushing wave of fatigue. It seemed to her that she had been far beyond the limits of human capacity, even hers; for a moment at transition her unprotected mind had experienced a shadow of the machine's clarity and power, and she was trembling and weak with reaction. She collected herself with an effort, tried to make sense of Caroline's frightened and excited questions. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 42713 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!cs.uoregon.edu!milton!phylo.genetics.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 69 Message-ID: <1991Jul5.232811.18137@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 5 Jul 91 23:28:11 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 152 69. Message "...one thousand five, one thousand six--" Caroline counted aloud, watching the lightplay of the CPU's monitors, the continual flow of status information flickering along its internal latticework. Suddenly another voice cut across hers, eerily similar, though the tone was tentative and unsure. "Hey, what are you doing? Please talk to me." "Jayhawk! Is that you? What--" "At Anubis," said the voice, and then almost immediately, "Growing. Learning." "Jayhawk!" She pounded her fists on a black-glass screen. Suddenly Anubis seemed like a trap, possessed by something foreign. She wanted to run away. "Jay! What's wrong?" "At star," the voice said. "Caroline?" She activated the alarm code Jayhawk had given her, its timer set for *now*. Was it Jayhawk at all? What was she talking to? "Too inefficient for now," the voice said regretfully. "Talk to you later." It changed, or another voice replaced it, sharp and faintly accented. "Isn't this neat? Bye!" Piebald's voice. "Jayhawk! Come back! You promised me you'd come back." A shimmer in the lightplay resolved into Jayhawk, balanced on a narrow platform near the bottom of the CPU. She raised one hand, frowned slightly. "Are you all right? What happened?" Jayhawk looked up at her, nodded, her face abstracted. A soft bell chimed; she recognized it as an email warning, though she'd never heard it used. Anubis contained an elaborate email system which the traffic between her and Jayhawk had hardly tested. Jayhawk didn't move, but the message scrolled up on a velvet-black panel near her: >From: @@Anubis >To: Jayhawk@Anubis > >Additional 1% okay? Jayhawk nodded sharply, her response flowing across the bottom of the panel: >Yes; why? The reply was almost instantaneous: >Speech and graphics programming. "I'm all right," said Jayhawk to her without looking up. "That's the egg in the CPU. It does seem to be Piebald and Angela, in some sense-- modelled in the Life-game code." "What was it like?" said Caroline, unable to restrain herself. "I mean, what did it feel like?" Jayhawk settled herself in a loop of the webwork, let out a long slow breath. "It was terrific," she said at last. "Smoother than the Hidden Fortress, no confusion, no awkwardness about being able to make sense of human memories. No limits--the CPU touches everything. A little scary, how good it felt. It was...it was hard to come back." She looked at her hands again. "This is very limiting." With precise, careful movements, she took the silver circlet off, compressed it and put it away at her belt. Caroline put a hand on her shoulder, felt the cool tingle of her presence. She didn't know whether to be envious or afraid. "What did you find out?" Jayhawk seemed to be struggling to explain what she had seen. "A huge process, like a tree holding the Life-game in its branches, with one big root running all the way down. I think I gave it that, with my offers to Angela and Piebald. 'Whatever strength or certainty I have, I share with you.'" She described the pattern of processes in the time-share period. "Hm. Do you know that Anubis thinks of its past as data, just like every- thing else? It could change its past, but it doesn't because that would make it less useful. Less predictive. Anyway, I have a guess as to what all this means, but only a guess. "I think the cascade of processes was an attempt to implement what I wanted to do with Piebald--linking him to the source of my power directly. They were sabotaged almost immediately by huge system demands from the fetus. I don't know whether she was trying to stop the cascade by hanging the system, or whether that was just a byproduct of something more direct, but I bet it was one or the other." "Makes sense." Jayhawk's attitude toward Piebald bothered Caroline severely, but arguing the point didn't seem productive. "I terminated--completed--one of those processes when I linked to Angela, but the other two just expanded to fill the free space. I'm not sure they could have executed correctly even without the fetus' interference. They were pretty big." She frowned. "I *think* Piebald and Angela may have short-circuited the whole thing when they touched. Aborted the processes, maybe accomplished the same end another way. The information's not there." "What end?" "I wish I knew." She summarized her conversation with the Life-game. "I suppose we could send it email, though I got the impression that it wasn't ready to talk to us yet." They discussed the message for a little while. Jayhawk seemed somewhat abstracted, withdrawn, but not otherwise changed, to Caroline's relief. She remembered Channa's dismay at the effects of blending with the machine. Their eventual message was a compromise between two rather different ideas: >From: Jayhawk@Anubis >To: @@Anubis > >Do you know what code the processes numbered 9992, 10002, and 10034 were >executing, or their intention? > >When will your growth be complete? I plan to change Anubis radically, >and I'm concerned about harm to you or us. The response was quick: >Unknown; >unknown; >I will survive. Caroline stared at it, chilled. "How does it know? Do you think it understands what I'm planning to do?" "I am coming to suspect," said Jayhawk softly, "that it would be very hard for us to destroy it without destroying me. Though I would try, if I had to. Perhaps it trusts that we plan to survive." She put her hand over Caroline's, intensifying the tingling. "I think it's your move. I would really like to know who Angela was." Caroline nodded. "Send me to the Matrix." She could reach it by herself, via the garden, but it would be slower and more difficult. "I'll see what I can do." -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 42889 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!news-server.ecf!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!dali.cs.montana.edu!milton!phylo.genetics.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 70 Message-ID: <1991Jul11.025952.7960@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 11 Jul 91 02:59:52 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 147 70. Investigation When she returned to the Matrix, Caroline found mail waiting from Michael. It said simply: >I couldn't get into Angela's school records, but I talked to some >people who knew her. --Forked Lightning She read it over three or four times. Angela was a real person? It was getting fairly hard to disbelieve. No. Wait. What if this message, too, was a fake? She sent a reply asking Michael if they could meet in the evening, then returned to the search. A letter to Angela's boyfriend Mark netted her a rather harsh form letter, obviously composed by a lawyer, which said that Mark was not interested in discussing the matter except with the authorities. If "they" were faking all the evidence of Angela's existance, they were doing so continuously. She poked around in Mark's account for signs of tampering, found none. (She also discovered in passing that he was dating several different girls, none of whom knew about the others.) She found Angela's high school records, dug into the school newspaper to find a few pieces of decorative graphics credited to her. They were standard cut-and-paste work, no particular brilliance. Caroline had drawn similar ones in high school, probably with the same graphics package. When the leads ran dry--it didn't take long; in her nineteen years Angela had seldom come to the attention of the authorities--she sat in Osiris and tried to make sense of what she had. Angela Whitechapel seemed to have been a real person, though the events of the stimsense dream were probably untrue--the job application she/Angela had sent wasn't on record, and the news postings she remembered reading didn't exist. She'd disappeared the night of the stimsense dream, two weeks ago now. Why? She looked strikingly like Caroline, despite the age difference-- at least if memory and Matrix records were to be believed. Caroline broke into the University clinic, sifted through medical records until she found both hers and Angela's. Same blood type, small differences in the mishmash of letters that apparently represented some kind of tissue typing--unfamiliar with the jargon, she wasn't positive she was interpreting it correctly. The same extremely high cyberware tolerance, though Angela had never put it to the test. Slightly different serum parameters--but Angela was nine years younger than Caroline. They weren't genetically identical (pity, she thought, I could have used her credstick!) but they were exceptionally similar. Between the grades and the tolerance level, it seemed to Caroline that Angela would have made a superb decker. Where was she? An ugly possibility occurred to her. When Angela disappeared, Caroline's body had been captive in Montaigne Paradisio. Perhaps they had not wanted to free her physically, preferring to maintain that hold over her-- but had wanted her to do something that demanded physical form. Perhaps they intended her to possess Angela, aided by the physical similarity and by Angela's passionate desire to *be* Jayhawk. Aliantha had done such things, or so Martha had implied. Caroline remembered her terror at the prospect of becoming Aliantha's host. Was that what had been in store for her? Was it still? Not victim, but agressor? She wanted to take human form again; but not at Angela's expense. She felt an odd sense of responsibility for the girl. She considered hiring a private eye. She had no money--apparently her friends had ransacked and closed out her account, and she could hardly blame them--but she could steal some, if she had to. But if Paradisio had Angela, would it do any good? She might well be at the High Temple, or somewhere equally inaccessable. A brief visit to Anubis established that if there was a link from the Life-game in the CPU to any outside location, as there had once been to Caroline's body, it was too subtle for either Caroline or Jayhawk to perceive. Caroline returned to the Matrix, rather subdued, and found that it was time for her meeting with Michael. Time seemed to flow unpredictably differently between the Overnet and the Matrix; she was having no success at predicting how long she'd be gone. To her surprise, Michael spotted her at the same time that she saw him. "New sensor code!" he said jubilantly. "I told them that I was having trouble spotting things, and they got it for me right away. Straight from Singapore, they said." They spent the evening pulling the sensor code apart, at Caroline's suggestion, looking for traps. There were several neatly interwoven traces, but nothing else that she could spot. Sandwiched among the technical details, he told her about meeting Angela's friends. He had no doubt that she was real, though he *had* used email....none of them would see him in person; apparently the authorities had harassed them severely. Toward morning he asked her how her run had gone. "Still underway," she said, "and I'm scared to death. I have to make a leap in the dark, trust someone or not...." She could tell that any hint of personal involvement in the conversation made him nervous, but she wanted desperately, for another human being to acknowledge her. "Don't worry. I'm sure you'll do fine." In a challenging voice, "You have to, you still haven't explained that flying trick, and I can't even get started figuring out how you did it." "I don't know either." "Sure you don't." He snorted. "Okay, okay, I can take a hint." "Forked Lightning, would you want to do...what I've done?" "How can I tell? I don't know anything about it." She turned away, looking up into the shadowy overhang of the Matrix sky. They were in the University grid, weaving among the densely packed systems. "What would you say if I told you that I only exist here and on the Overnet, that there's nothing physical left?" "I always did figure you for an AI," he said in a voice that was only half joking. "Am I? Do I seem that...inhuman?" "How do you tell an AI from a human being? *I* don't know. You seem all right to me." He mused for a moment. "Would I do that? I'm not sure. Probably--to be as good as you are." "I have to go," she said awkwardly. "All right. I'll see you tomorrow," he said forcefully. "Is that a promise?" "No. But I'll do the best I can." She wanted to stay, desperate for some kind of comfort or reassurance, but he didn't understand, couldn't. She toyed with the idea of writing to Kurt or Yoichi, but that didn't seem any better. Martha understood, at least a little, but she didn't want to call Martha again. 'I can't do this very many more times,' Martha had said, and Caroline was resolved to make the next one count. Jayhawk was waiting, back at Anubis. There was really nowhere else to go. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 43144 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!sdd.hp.com!mips!cs.uoregon.edu!milton!phylo.genetics.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 71 Message-ID: <1991Jul17.005507.22975@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 17 Jul 91 00:55:07 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 69 71. Temptation Having seen firsthand how her system could be penetrated, Jayhawk settled herself to the task of plugging the hole. She quickly discovered just how difficult it was going to be. The "hole" was a basic part of Anubis' nature, its function as a gateway between the planes. She couldn't close it, and she had a lot of trouble seeing how she could defend it. It occured to her that she would understand better from within. Jayhawk lay back in her hammock, considered that. It *would* be more efficient to work from within the machine, all of its capabilities at her disposal. It would let her solve the problem in minutes rather than weeks; find a solution, perhaps, that she would never see otherwise. And sooner or later it would wear away her personality and will, until nothing was left but Anubis. She wasn't entirely sure she cared. The twelve seconds--she remembered each one of them individually, like days, like years--that she had spent within Anubis had been...she groped for words, found them unsatisfactory. Contentment seemed too passive, ecstasy too distracted....there had been no distractions; only effortless power, and the delight of experiencing her full capabilities--that was how it had felt, as if Anubis had always been meant to be a part of her, or she of it. It was hard to endure the separation, a second lack to add to the loss of Caroline. But she remembered, with the same crystalline, perfect clarity, how difficult it had been to escape, how far she had scattered herself into the machine. In eleven seconds. Anubis was stronger than she....no, that wasn't it exactly. She didn't have the strength in herself to deal with what she was being offered, to possess Anubis rather than being possessed. Anubis was perfect as she had created it, powerful as it should be. *She* was lacking. Dissolved in the glory of the machine...nothing would be lost; she had seen herself recorded in the patterns of code, everything she was. Only changed, changed beyond recall. She could almost see how to do it without Kurt's code, by will and intuition. She wrapped her arms around her, hiding her hands from the temptation of touch, the possibility.... It hurt, a physical ache in her chest and throat. She remembered Matrix deprivation. That had been addiction; this was not, it seemed to her--Anubis had cleansed her of such weaknesses. It was simply desire. The Matrix had been barely a shadow of what there was to be desired. *Anubis is mine! Why can't I survive it, what's wrong with me?* *Incomplete.* She remembered looking at the code that was herself, wondering what was lacking in it. Even in the embrace of the machine, she had still felt that lack. She was not whole without Caroline. "Mine," she said aloud, heard the faint echo of her voice in the recesses of the CPU. "I *need* her." She went back to her work, resolutely, struggling with the indirect access that was all she could manage in her embodied state. Once her control of Anubis from the CPU had seemed so perfect, impossible to improve on. She knew better now. But she did make progress, slowly ruling out approaches one after another. No answer presented itself. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 43208 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.ecf!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!qt.cs.utexas.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!dali.cs.montana.edu!milton!phylo.genetics.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 72 Message-ID: <1991Jul18.040900.1459@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 18 Jul 91 04:09:00 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 90 72. Night She had created Anubis as a jewel of light in the midst of darkness, its silver bridges suspended over starless black pools, dark depths yawning beneath the watchtowers, the CPU itself dim as starlight. But it had never seemed like night to Caroline until now. She and Jayhawk shared the long night in their private node, sitting together on the soft black-padded shelf high above the uncertain and broken flooring, the lights of Anubis' functioning a continual soft flow about them. Slowly, feeling her way, she told Jayhawk the story of everything that had happened to her since their intial separation. Her frustration and jealousy, her despair that everything she did seemed to serve Lefty's plan, the Dragon's plan, especially her dealings with Angela. Shame that she might have helped Paradisio sacrifice an innocent, and that she cared what they thought of her, that the title of High Priestess stirred a sick pride and desire in her. The wild freedom of flight, the terror of defying the Hawk, denying the Balance, and the pain of its gift. The worse pain of Jayhawk's mistrust, driving them apart. She'd told most of it before, but not so honestly, not in such detail. It didn't come easily. She'd never been good at talking about personal matters. "You've changed," said Jayhawk at last. "I know." She looked up, met silver-blue eyes like a mirror of her own. "But not to suit them. No matter what they say, no matter how they try to twist it around." Whispered, looking down: "I will die before I serve *him*. And damn it all, I don't intend to die." "I know," the other whispered, voice as like hers as an echo. "I believe you, too." She uncurled, lay face-down on the shelf, staring down into the node, and spun her own story in return. Piebald and the perverse trust they had come to share. Her helpless fury at the fetus, at all the intrusions she didn't have the power or control to stop. And worst of all, the delight of Anubis, of power, completion, effortless clarity--and the knowledge that it would destroy her, unravel her personality strand by strand until, though every fiber remained, the tapestry was gone. "I have no soul," she whispered. "Or something like that. You have your power, your flight, your visions and your freedom. I have Anubis; or I thought I did." Caroline put her arms around Jayhawk, felt the sharp tingle of her presence. Words came unbidden to mind: *Whatever power or surety I have, I share with you now.* She wanted it to be now....Sharp as Matrix withdrawal, deep as the knife-cut of death that had touched her twice now, desire ached at her. "How can we do it?" she said simply, and Jayhawk, understanding, replied: "Go back to your garden, remake Anubis as you see it should be. I'll hold things together from here as long as I can, and then go within. Work quickly, Caroline. I want to live too." "What about the Life-game?" "It will have to take its chances, and so will we. I'm not willing to wait any longer. I don't want to lose you. I don't want to lose *me*. And...in the long run I think Martha was right the first time. We don't survive like this." She leaned her head back, resting it against Caroline. "I think it will be...a lot like dying. What will that make it, three times?" Unexpectedly she laughed, a soft clear sound like an echo of the system's chimes. "I've thought about it, and I have a spell for you, o magician. 'I embrace you, and claim all your power, your knowledge, your soul. I accept your embrace, and surrender to you all my knowledge, my power, my soul.' It has to be both." Her voice was ragged. "Or one of us dies, at least. Maybe both. We're both very stubborn." Caroline nodded, afraid to speak, and pushed herself off the platform, hovering in the shadows of the node. She spread her arms, the garment she had woven of her life-thread spilling about her like wings. From the platform, Jayhawk reached out a hand, waving goodbye or perhaps reaching for her, as if to share her flight. Sunlight in the garden, and the islands spread out below her, waiting for the touch of transformation. -- [And then the GM called a two-week time out so that he could think about it! ARGH!] -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 43499 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!samsung!dali.cs.montana.edu!milton!phylo.genetics.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 73 Message-ID: <1991Jul26.023229.10481@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 26 Jul 91 02:32:29 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 199 73. Crow Caroline circled the islands, late-afternoon sun casting her shadow sharp and dark below her. She was trying to picture the changes she would have to make. Jayhawk was counting on her to complete the transformation quickly; she couldn't afford false starts. When she was satisfied with her planning she landed, set briskly to work--pulling bridges out by the roots, setting them into place again, shaping the topology of Anubis. The heavy labor was done by imagined machinery, but she watered down each bridge by hand as she set it, tamped the soil carefully into place. Seven bridges connected the islands to the shore. She considered leaving some of them intact, but a careful count showed her that there were no extra bridges; she had just enough to complete the pattern. So she separated the islands from the mainland as she worked. It didn't matter to her anyway, she told herself; after all, she could fly. The work got harder as she spiralled inwards. She developed a painful headache, made worse by the sunlight glittering off the water. A splash in the pool made her feel better, but only for a little while. Each time she closed her eyes, conjured up her bridge-pulling machinery, the bridges seemed to offer more resistance. There was rust in the cogs of her machines. She was terrified that she'd end up with bridges that didn't reach, but she was always able to make them fit. Exhaustion crept over her as the sun dipped. She tried to pace herself, saving her energy for the end, but she was afraid to rest. Jayhawk might be in danger, might be fighting desperately to hold Anubis and herself together. Toward the end she was lying curled into a ball on the central island, glancing up through pain-squinted eyes every now and again to make sure she was placing the bridges correctly. She was shocked to find that she'd come to the last one. She pulled it out, set her digging machine to making a hole for it, lowered it in--she'd stopped doing any of the work by hand some time ago; the machines were difficult to visualize, but better than manual labor-- Something picked her up with overwhelming force, flung her away. She found herself at the edge of a looming forest, tumbled on dry grass. She leaped to her feet, looked around wildly. Behind her, the grass stretched on and on, toward a horizon more distant than she had ever seen before. The sky was blue and utterly empty. A faint internal tugging suggested that Anubis lay the other way, into the trees. With a cry of frustration and anger, she willed herself into the air, forward. She couldn't get above the trees. After a moment's futile effort, she settled into a fast, weaving flight barely three meters off the ground. The canopy seemed higher here than it had near Anubis; she didn't *feel* any more limited, but she couldn't even come near the treetops. A black bird crossed her path, began to circle her. It was faster than she, mockingly so. She tried to ignore it. Another joined it, and another. They were big birds, though not as big as the hawk. One opened its mouth and let out a rusty creak; the others took it up, until her ears were aching with their clamor. Seven or eight of them now. She had to fight to keep from veering when they flew close to her. It seemed to her that they were laughing at her. Ten. Twelve. They were beginning to interfere with her vision. She landed abruptly on a wide branch, clutched the trunk as it swayed under her weight. The raucous cawing resolved into words. She could identify no individual bird as speaking to her--they tossed the words back and forth, circling her branch in a black stream, dizzying and confusing. "Quick! Quick! Where are you going? So fast!" "To my own place," she said, glaring at them. Were they stopping her? She'd made so little progress--Anubis hardly seemed nearer. "Your own place? A long way. You'll never get there like this." She could no longer count them: a cloud of birds. "Do you have a better idea?" "We could help the poor hawk. Give her speed. Never get there in time. Quick!" they cawed. "What do you want in return?" "Just a little pretty. Just a trinket. You'll never miss it." Her hand closed in the soft weave of the garment she wore, spun from the thread of her own life. It shimmered silver and icy blue in the dapples of sunlight. "You can't have that. It's mine." There was no doubt in her mind what they were looking at; their black eyes glittered with greed in its reflection. "It's just a pretty. Not important. Not nearly as important as speed. Quick! Quick!" A clamor of voices. "We won't hurt it, we'll keep it safe. Pretty!" "No!" She drew her lightblade, held it defensively across her body. The birds drew back a little. Realizing she was being stalled, she leaped into the air, flew onwards. The birds followed her, a seething stream of black. "Isn't there anything else you want?" she said, watching them as carefully as she dared while flying. She had an uncomfortable image of hundreds of black beaks and claws descending on the fragile thread. They were going to be sorry if they tried that, she resolved. She flew lower, ready to land if she had to fight. "Just a little pretty. We can make you fast, fast. More! Do you want a body? Can make you a body. Go anywhere you want. Be free." "Hardly. If you strip my life away I won't be going anywhere. What would you do with it, anyway? Stuff it into a nasty tree somewhere?" "Keep it safe," they cried. "Never lose it. Never die." "I can manage that for myself," she said. "No. Keep back, you, if you want to keep your beak!" She waved the blade at the nearest bird; it fluttered away with insolent slowness. An idea occurred to her. "How do I know you're telling the truth, that you can really make me fast? Show me!" The birds formed into two coherent streams, beaks almost touching tailfeathers, one circling her vertically, the other horizontally. She felt their power tugging at her, augmenting her own. For a moment the trees whizzed by, almost too fast to distinguish. Then they broke into a loose cloud again, and she slowed. She tried to imitate their quickness, found she had no power to do so. "That wasn't so fast," she ventured. "Is that the best you can do? Show me some real speed." The birds cawed scorn at her. "Give us the pretty! Or at least a little piece, a little bit of it. You won't miss it. You'll never get there without us!" The trees weren't even feathery here; and though she felt she was making progress, it was impossibly slow. Jayhawk could be dying....She landed on the ground, looked at the circling birds thoughtfully. "Well," she said, unravelling the very end of the life-thread, "maybe just a *little* piece of the pretty...." She held out her wrist. With every circle there were fewer birds. She never saw any of them leave, but their numbers dwindled and dwindled until there was just one, a fat black bird that settled onto her wrist, reached out a greedy beak for the thread. She seized it around the neck with both hands. It let out an offended squawk, struggled wildly against her. "Let go! No fair!" Suddenly she was holding a thick green snake, coils lashing against her arms. She screamed, held on for dear life, squeezing as hard as she could. It turned back into a bird, hung limply between her hands, glaring at her. "So!" she said. "I have a better deal in mind. How about you promise to speed me to my destination, and I let you go with your neck intact?" "Stupid deal," it said bitterly, then squawked again as she shook it. "Deal! Yes! Promise!" "With no side effects. No harm to the system or to me." "Side effects?" Cawing laughter. "All right. Promise." "And the greatest speed you can give me." "Promise." It struggled weakly, fixed a reproachful eye on her. She pursed her lips, let go with one hand and seized one of its tail feathers before letting go with the other. It pulled free reflexively, leaving a glossy black feather in her hand. "Caw!" It flew up to perch above her head. Looking down, it said thoughtfully, "I like you. Speed!" A raucous laugh. "You're going the wrong way. Your garden is over there." It jerked its head to the right. She waggled the feather at it in warning. It was a mage's gesture, and complete bluff in her hands--she didn't have any way to hurt it through the material link. But perhaps it didn't know that. Rightward didn't *feel* like the way to Anubis, but maybe.... She willed herself into the air, flew in the indicated direction. The bird followed her. "How about some fire? Do you want some fire?" it called out. Almost at once the trees became shorter, and glossy feathers replaced leaves and bark. "No!" she shouted back. She had what she wanted, and no interest in playing further games. Its laughter followed her all the way to the hedge maze. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 43500 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!cs.uoregon.edu!milton!phylo.genetics.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 74 Message-ID: <1991Jul26.025546.13983@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 26 Jul 91 02:55:46 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 184 74. Mark Caroline flew over the hedge-maze, looking in toward the islands. The water around them was streaked with whitecaps, waves lapping at the shore, though she could feel no wind. Abruptly the hedges reared up, towering about her, and she fell. Her ability to fly had apparently deserted her. She picked herself up from the feathered ground, tried to will herself upwards and was rewarded with a vicious stab from her headache. Nearly nauseous with pain, she decided not to try that again. It might be a maze, but it was *her* maze. She wouldn't get lost. "You should have taken the fire!" cawed a distant voice behind her. She ignored it. This place was a representation of Anubis; she would no more have set fire to it than to her own body. She didn't get lost, though the twisting pathways were more confusing than she had expected. Something inside her knew the way; she never hesitated for more than an instant at the crossings, even though she wasn't always certain exactly where she was. The maze straightened out into a last corridor; she could see surf pounding at the shore, the islands waiting beyond. She broke into a run. Ahead of her, a section of the feathery hedge broke off, stepped into her path. It spread itself like a lesser wall, blocking her passage. She almost tried to crash through it, stopped at the last moment when she realized that it was a creature, not a wall. It seemed to be a green and gold peacock, its brilliantly-eyed tail reaching higher than her head. All the eyes were looking at her. "Who are you?" she said savagely. "What do you want?" She was growing furiously impatient with the delays. "Someone who belongs here," it said in a soft voice. "Where are you going? Think." On the last word all its eyes blinked in unison. "Where *I* belong." She waved a hand at the islands. "What are you taking there with you? What follows you that does not belong? Think." *Blink* She bit her lip. "I don't understand." "Think." *Blink* She looked behind her. The sky was cloudier than it had been, as if a storm was coming. The tops of the feathered trees rippled gently. She could see no pursuer. Abruptly a thought struck her. She dug the black feather out of her belt pouch, dropped it on the ground and put one foot on it. "There. Is that better?" "That is part of what follows," murmured the peacock. "There is more. Think." *Blink* She was sorry to give up the feather, though she had no idea what she could do with it. But she was desperate not to allow foreign influence into Anubis, into her soul. She folded her arms, tried to think. Dozens of green-and-blue eyes regarded her. *Blink* It was distracting. She closed her own eyes. "Oh!" she said suddenly, took the lightblade's hilt from her belt. It was ornate, almost baroque, the sign of Martha's tampering. She threw it on the ground, stripped off the lenses pushed back on her head, the communicator behind one ear, all the decking code she carried. Martha and the others might have meddled with any of it. Though it made her uncomfortable, she peeled off the silver body-armor beneath her glittering poncho, felt the gathering breeze probe in at her. It was colder than it had been. It was deeply disturbing to be without her decking tools. "All right?" she said to the peacock in a challenging voice. "Will that do?" It seemed to frown, said in quite a different voice "533--seg violation--core--" and then in its normal one "There is still something else. These represent the creature which follows, but not the place. Think." *Blink* She was naked except for the key, her poncho, and the code that made up her Matrix image. She wouldn't give up any of those. The Lefty code? But the hawk had freed her from that. Her links to Jayhawk, to Anubis? Those were *hers*. "Think," whispered the peacock. Words scrolled across its eyes, left to right: "sub 2/main partition/4b32/matrix." The eyes blinked, and the words vanished. "I don't know what you're talking about!" She would have pushed past it, except that it had been right; she would have been a fool to carry the feather, the contaminated code. She was terribly afraid of making a mistake. It seemed to her that any error now would be irrevocable. "Red!" it said in the other voice, a familiar voice, and broke apart into horizontal shimmers of light which rapidly faded to nothing. Its eyes were on her until they vanished. Caroline sat down on the ground, her back to the hedge, and tried to think. What could she be carrying that would betray her? Should she be listening to the peacock in the first place? Maybe it was trying to trick her. Maybe it was Lefty. She'd met him once on the Matrix, seen him fade out like that. But the voice had been familiar, and not Lefty's. She ground her palms into her forehead, felt the faint warmth of the scar she carried. She knew its pattern without needing to look at it: the outspread talon of a hawk. She snarled, tried to erase it by reshaping her image. She could change her form--it was easier here than on the Matrix, as if her will more than her code held it in place--but the mark remained through the changes. When she and her friends had been running from Paradisio, they'd spent a good deal of time being remodelled in beauty parlors. She visualized one of the rotating brushes that they'd used to remove old skin dye, tried to apply it to her forehead. Her skin tickled, then burned, then bled, but the mark remained in place. Jayhawk had warned her that she might not be her own master anymore, having bargained with the hawk as she had. She'd denied it. Was this proof that she was wrong? Was she about to betray Jayhawk, and *die* when her doubts were discovered, or worse, live to find she'd enslaved them both? She raised one arm, shouted into the gathering wind "Hawk! I need to talk to you!" A prickle ran through her arm, almost painful. High above, a point of darkness circled, stooped. "Why have you marked me?" she screamed at it as it veered close to her, climbed again to circle tightly just above. "It shows that you are real," it said. "They can't duplicate that as easily as a tapestry." She laughed, startled out of her anger. At Paradisio they'd confounded her attempts to distinguish the Matrix from the physical world, duplicating her Matrix tapestries on her bedroom walls. "Why can't I change it?" "You can," said the hawk, circling. "But only by changing yourself. That way you will always know who you are." She touched her forehead--the bleeding had stopped as soon as she stopped attending to it. "That's all? It doesn't bind me to you?" "No!" cried the hawk in a shrill voice. "I did not set you free only to tie you up again." "I may have to change myself, to do this--will you try to stop me?" "No. Do you need to be stopped?" "No!" she shouted back, fiercely exultant. She remembered looking into the mirror and seeing Angela, caught in the stimsense delusion. The hawk had given her a weapon against that. "Thank you!" She hesitated an instant, said much more tentatively, "Can you see any other bindings on me? You look like you have sharp eyes." It circled low over her. "No," it said. "Your soul is clean." She saluted it with an upraised arm. "Good hunting!" It beat upwards, vanishing almost at once. She turned, ran toward the islands. She'd left herself no bridges connecting to the shore. The water was frothy and opaque, but she remembered a place where it was shallow, went splashing into it. Only a desperate scramble kept her from being swept under. The water was deeper than it had been, and there was a violent current pulling downwards. She pulled herself back onto land, stood dripping. One of the islands was within two meters of the shore. Telling herself that she could always fly rather than fall, she backed up, made a running leap for it. It was almost like jumping in the low-gravity nodes of Anubis; she described a graceful arc like an echo of the missing bridge, landed firmly on the island. Wind whipped at her. She glanced around to orient herself, ran for the center. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 43508 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!dali.cs.montana.edu!milton!phylo.genetics.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 75 Message-ID: <1991Jul26.143839.26408@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 26 Jul 91 14:38:39 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 130 75. Memory Not until Caroline was halfway across the final bridge did she see the woman waiting on the central island. She was sitting on the feathery grass, cross-legged, her hands resting palm up on her knees. She wore a grey jogging suit with a fine pink stripe up each side; her hair was chestnut brown, coming to a point in the middle of a high forehead, and her eyes were closed. Caroline had never seen her before. The bridge beneath her swayed alarmingly. She stepped off it, onto the solid ground of the final island, and at once the woman leaped up, snapped into attention facing her. Reflexively Caroline reached for her lightblade. It was gone. She'd left it in the hedge maze. "Jayhawk," the woman said, her voice soft and faintly accented. "If you're hearing this, then I've managed to fool them all." She stood silently. Intuition suggested that she was not dealing with a living being; it seemed to her that she would have known if someone else set foot here. "If you're here to trigger this, you must be quite far along. You're about to bind your own system, or you think you are.--I find there's not really much difference. "I don't know what name you know me by, if any; but you probably know my title. I was High Priestess of the Seattle area. "So, ask your questions. I'm sure you have hundreds of them." In a level voice, Caroline said, "*He* told me that you died to save my life. Why?" A point of light appeared at the top of the woman's head, swept downwards to her feet. It left her a man, dressed head to toe in black leather decorated with steel and chrome. He had wild black hair blending with a thick beard, a silver skull dangling from one earlobe. The flicker of light swept back upwards, and he moved, orienting himself on Caroline. In a rough voice he said: "So now ask yourself, What is human and what is truth? Ask yourself, Whose voice is it that whispers up to you From the cellars ofyour comes. From the tops of your city roofs? Ask yourself, Whose voice is this that whispers unto you?" The light flickered down and up again, faster this time, transforming him into a black-haired woman in heavy crimson and gold robes, cloaked in dark brown velvet. Jewels glittered in her hair. She didn't seem to see Caroline at all, or anything else around her. "Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand? Come let me clutch thee: I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art though not, fatal vision, sensible To feeling as to sight? or art thou but A dagger of the mind, a false creation, Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?" Her accent was unfamiliar to Caroline, and so thick that the words were barely intelligable. Caroline sat down on the end of the bridge, arms folded, struggling with anger. She was being taunted, not offered true answers to her questions--what had she expected, truth from the High Priestess? The image changed again, into a short, balding man with wire-rimmed, archaic glasses. He pursed his lips at her, said in an unexpectedly deep and rumbling voice: "He who fights with monsters might take care, lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes long into you." Caroline squirmed a little. That she understood. The image reformed once more, becoming Aliantha again. She bowed her head, said in her own voice, softly: "What is the worst of woes that wait on age? What stamps the wrinkle deeper on the brow? To view each loved one blotted from life's page, And be alone on earth as I am now. "That's not a question with a simple answer, I'm afraid." Wistfully, the image went on, "It's been a long time since I talked with anyone like this." "A couple of months, by the world's timescale," said Caroline, thinking of her meeting with Aliantha at the Hidden Fortress. "Much longer than that." Her eyes met Caroline's for a moment; they were blue-grey, old as the sea. "What else do you want to know?" "I have only one more question," said Caroline tightly. "How can I rid myself of you?" A flicker of sympathy, but it was lost in her desperation. She'd lived with the shadow of Aliantha's influence for too long. She wanted to be free, and know that she was free. "Just say goodbye. This is only memory, and it will disappear when you are done with it.--Though I'll leave some clues as to how I did this. It's rather elegant." Her mind was clamoring with questions. What had Aliantha intended in saving her? What was the Lefty code intended to do? Who was *he*, and how could he be healed or destroyed? How was Marianne involved? Very slowly, she said, "I don't think I should ask you how you did things, because I know that you did something wrong, to end up as you did. I don't want any part of you and your plans. I'm sorry, because I'm sure it would have been interesting--" Her heart ached for the loss of knowledge; but she felt she had no choice. "Goodbye." The image bowed. "Just one final word. 'Operation Sunflower.' Goodbye, Jayhawk." It winked out abruptly. She stood a moment, hands knotted in frustration and anger. No good, Caroline. Calm down. You can't do anything in this state of mind. She scanned the island, searching for anything that might have been left behind, as Lefty had contaminated Anubis with his dust to give the fetus access. Nothing seemed out of place. Taking a deep breath, she sat down with her back to the central tree, gathered up her image of Anubis in her mind and set about recreating it. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 43509 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!cs.uoregon.edu!milton!phylo.genetics.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 76 Message-ID: <1991Jul26.150314.29796@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 26 Jul 91 15:03:14 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 77 76. Dissolution Jayhawk had reluctantly added new connections to the system, bracing the most delicate nodes. The three SAN nodes were now spliced to the nodes surrounding them, the watchtowers anchored firmly into the complexes on both sides, which were in turn cross-braced to one another. The Gate chamber was linked to the CPU. She hated the changes--they were bad security, and they cluttered up the system's beauty. But it had quickly become apparent that without them, what Caroline was doing would tear Anubis apart. She would have been tempted to deal with an invader simply by breaking one or two of the bracing connections, letting part of the system disintegrate around him. She didn't dare leave the CPU herself, for the same reason. She remained there as long as she dared, watching the outer nodes vanish and reappear, working constantly to contain the damage. The new connections meshed with the system a little less efficiently than the old, but system load was remaining within tolerable parameters. She'd sent a message to the Life-game: *Reduce your load to the absolute minimum. Send no processes out of your partition.* So far it had complied. But as Caroline worked her way through the inner nodes, datastores and I/O links only two or three steps from the CPU, the violence which she was doing to the system with every breakage and rejoining started to jar outer structures loose despite all the bracing Jayhawk could provide. Contact with the SANs became fuzzy, intermittant. Jayhawk had disconnected Anubis from the Matrix, and they hung alone and untethered in the Overnet. Reluctantly, she took down the peripheral IC, leaving them open. She wouldn't have trusted it anyway, with the nodes supporting it in such disarray. Anyone fool enough to come into the system now would probably be trapped by the waves of near-disconnection. Removing the demands of the IC bought her a few more minutes, three additional nodes. Then a deep crack shot through node 2-1, the lacy telecom structure of her personal area. Almost without considering it, she touched the circlet in her hair, let herself fall into the thoughts of the machine. Weeks passed. Her consciousness had to extend to the nodes which were being disconnected and rejoined, the new connectors Caroline was making. Each breakage separated part of her from the rest. More and more, when contact was restored the separated part took on a kind of autonomy: her awareness was becoming distributed into packets, each concerned with a different part of the system. It should have been a vague feeling, but like everything else it was crystal clear. She was being fragmented with the fragmentation of her machine. She didn't even consider trying to back out. After a while, the thought was no longer accessable. Past and future were irrelevant; she suppressed them, concentrating all resources on the present, on maintaining herself intact. Herself? On maintaining the system. More and more, that was the only consideration. She no longer thought of Caroline; the progressive changes were data, conditions with which she must deal, their purpose irrelevant. Once, during a brief respite from the stresses, she looked at herself, at the nexus of code in the CPU, its roots extending downward beyond her perception. It was no longer partitioned from the rest; she was wound through the operating system, echoed in the distorted reflections of the nodes. No longer executed as a single program; parts were under the control of auxillary subsystems, like the utilities that maintained the bracing connectors, the damage-control daemons that rerouted essential flows past the broken areas. It felt neither right nor wrong. Only necessary, and irrevocable. In the end, Anubis clung to existence with every resource available to it, power and will and desire. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 43538 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!uwm.edu!caen!dali.cs.montana.edu!milton!phylo.genetics.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 77 Message-ID: <1991Jul26.213904.5516@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 26 Jul 91 21:39:04 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 70 77. Wave Wind and water were filled with chaotic force, pulling in all directions. There was enough power there to rearrange the islands-- enough to destroy them, Caroline could feel, and probably the surrounding garden as well. She struggled to rid her mind of the image of concrete islands broken loose from their bases, the dirt dribbling out into the water, raw concrete stumps sticking up from the bottom of the pool. That was what had kept her from trying to make an island-moving machine. But the water was deeper now, she told herself; the islands probably didn't even touch bottom. And in any case.... Was she a magician? Did she really believe that? She still wasn't sure. But if she was going to have to be one in order to get the islands moving, she would. It was rapidly getting dark, the sky shrouded in layer upon layer of clouds until it seemed she could reach out and touch them. She remembered vaguely that one wasn't supposed to stand under a tree in a lightning storm. She waved a defiant fist at the sky. Let the lightning hit her! It was hers. She called out to the islands, shaping the currents of wind and water around them, drawing them into place; and they answered her, ponderous as huge ships, gliding deliberately through the rising surf. The sky darkened further, lightning flickering in the distance, drawing closer. She began to see feathers in the wind, torn from the islands and the maze beyond. As before, she worked from the outermost islands, spiralling in. The bridges might have constrained her, but they did not. Each island fit into place with a sense of terrible assurance; there was nothing but her will, her cherished image of the system map, to hold them, and yet they felt like the roots of mountains. The wind was a hurricane now, spiralling around the point of stillness where she was; she could no longer see the hedge maze, walled off by feathers and water. Inward and inward. She no longer felt tired, only feverishly exalted, dizzy with the wash of power around her. She was not so much controlling the storm as riding it like a motorcycle, leaning her little weight into its balance to make it turn. Lightning again. It struck somewhere nearby, she couldn't see where, blinded by the walls of the hurricane. The final islands were gliding into place. Another flare, much more brilliant--and she saw the water rearing up around her, an impossible wave, fifty meters or more of water balanced for a frozen instant-- *There's not that much water in the entire pool!* she thought crazily, and threw her arms around the palm tree she stood by, bracing herself for the impact. No thought of flight. Here she was, and here she would stay. The wave crashed upon her, flung her high--but not away, still at the center, the eye of the storm. Darkness embraced her, supporting her with overwhelming strength--she could have been torn to pieces in an instant, but the water held her like a lover. It was Jayhawk's strength when she had saved Caroline's life, the unknown power that had pulled her back from the infinite fall after the stimsense illusion-- and more, power of her own that she had never tapped, never imagined. It lifted her to the sky, flung her high as spray, then subsided, setting her down gently on her feet. She was unharmed, not even wet. She opened her eyes to utter darkness. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 43537 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!dali.cs.montana.edu!milton!phylo.genetics.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 78 Message-ID: <1991Jul26.214036.5952@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 26 Jul 91 21:40:36 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 61 78. Union Caroline found herself in velvet darkness, standing on nothing perceptible. She was carrying nothing except the shimmer of her life- thread around her. The key was gone. She turned slowly, found a single point of brightness in the dark. It resolved into an image like a mirror of herself, but naked without the protective cloak of light. She stood still, watching as the other approached. It was Jayhawk, she felt that with certainty; Jayhawk as she had never truly seen her, a separate person--perhaps a friend, perhaps a beloved sister, perhaps an adversary, but utterly separate from herself. Jayhawk stopped a few meters away, said softly "Caroline." It was more recognition than question. "I don't know if I succeeded, if I kept the system together long enough. I was failing, at the end." The key was at her belt. "Long enough," Caroline whispered. Jayhawk frightened her as the tsunami had not. "You know, all the arguments for doing this seem pretty hard to believe, now." Jayhawk nodded, silently. *I want to share this with her, I love her....the glory of the wave, the power of Anubis....but to *become* her....* Something almost akin to embarrassment gripped her; she couldn't find anything to say, couldn't bring herself to make any move, toward Jayhawk or away from her. Still silent, Jayhawk put her arms around Caroline, drew her close. She was cool to the touch, cool as the water had been. Caroline rested her head on Jayhawk's shoulder, struggling for words. She remembered what the other had told her. 'I embrace you, and claim all your power, your knowledge, your soul./I accept your embrace, and surrender to you all my knowledge, my power, my soul.' But which one first? It seemed to matter terribly, and she couldn't decide. Suddenly she laughed aloud, put her arms around Jayhawk, mirroring her embrace. No words at all. A soft bell chimed somewhere, and a voice spoke, not quite her own: "Process 1247 terminated. Process 0001 terminated." An instant's pause. "Goodbye." She spun in darkness, a single crystalline point of light. Slowly, precise as the growth of a crystal, graceful as an elaborate dance, Anubis formed about her, reflections echoing outward and coming back to her at the center, each time greater and more beautiful. The pattern resolved, each detail perfect: the spiderwork of the CPU bridges, the watchtower windows mirroring the entire system, the patterns of light on light in the main datastores, the pulsing ebb and flow of the machine's life. The extraneous connections were gone, all of the damage she had fought to contain healed as if it had never been. More than healed. It was *right*, right as it had never been--it had always mirrored her division, from the moment of her attunement to it. It mirrored her wholeness now, more beautiful than she had ever imagined. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 43622 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!dali.cs.montana.edu!milton!phylo.genetics.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 79 Message-ID: <1991Jul29.213922.27093@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 29 Jul 91 21:39:22 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 103 79. Silver Suddenly she found herself at the center of the garden, though she hadn't moved; she could still feel Anubis around her. Brilliant sunlight revealed islands cleansed of vegetation and soil, stripped down to silver metal in graceful organic forms. The water was clear and calm, showing no sign of the storm; but beyond it, the hedge-maze was in ruins, every feather torn from it. The ground was heaped with sodden plumage. Something moved behind her. She turned, finding that the palm tree to which she had clung during the storm was still there, incongrous amidst the metal. Behind it, a few meters away, stood something like a silver image of herself, though her hair was tumbled loose down her back. She smiled shyly at Jayhawk. Even her eyes were silver, mirror- bright. Jay clutched at the tree, fighting a sudden strong desire to run away--or, better, fly. She could see the silver woman's nature as if she were running analysis code, probing her. She was Angela, and Piebald. She was also Jayhawk herself, in some way which she didn't understand; and Anubis. Holding the tree as if to anchor herself to the spot, Jayhawk whispered, "Who am I, then?" "Jayhawk," said the other. The voice was not quite hers. "Aren't you? Jayhawk and Caroline." It had been so simple, after all the fear and resistance. She remembered what she had done as Jayhawk, as Caroline; saw, as neither of them could, just what she had lacked. So simple, and so sweet....But Jayhawk had been *herself*, Caroline had been....Who was this, what claim did it have on her? "What do you want? Who are you?" Why did it terrify her so much? The silver one glanced down. "Angela, in a way; and Piebald, I guess...." She looked up, eyes wide. "Part of you, or that's what I want to be. What I should be." Jayhawk's skin crawled. She dug her nails into the feathery bark, managed to keep herself still. "Was Angela a real person?" "Yes. I'm not exactly her, though. I think I started out as a simulation, though I'm more than that now." She made no move to approach Jayhawk, though something in her stance suggested that she wanted to. "I'm scared to death," Jayhawk whispered. It was impossibly hard to confront the thought of merger again; she'd been sure it was done, once and for all. "So am I." To Jayhawk she seemed more shy, and a little embarrassed, than frightened. Jayhawk held out one hand, very slowly, then dropped it. "A simulation? *They* made you?" "I don't serve them," said the other with calm certainty. "I never will." She had promised Angela: Whatever strength or surety I have, I share with you freely. If you are a part of me, all this is yours too; and if not, I will see to it that you have your chance. She had promised Piebald the same. Remembering both, she fought against her terror. She wanted desperately to flee, to the Matrix, to Anubis proper, even to the physical world--anything to avoid the silver woman, so much like her, so different. Alien. She remembered Piebald's crazy flashes of insight, the ridiculous mess he'd made of her IC. And yet...'I am Jayhawk too,' he had told her when she named him; and somehow she had always believed him, in a baffled uncomprehending way. She rested her forehead against the tree, hiding her eyes, and held out her right hand. Smooth cool fingers brushed hers, took her hand in a firm grip. Water, tingling with sunlight, flowing into her veins, hot and cool at once...mainly cool, soothing as the water around the islands, and yet bright with power. She knew the one who touched her, entered her, finding her place within. She had felt that strength before, pulling her back from the darkness and its alluring promise of death when Jayhawk broke the stimsense dream and nearly destroyed Anubis. She had felt it around her in the embrace of the great wave. As before, it was simple, far simpler than she had imagined. She let go of the tree, let her perceptions shift until she saw Anubis around her again. The light-play of the CPU welcomed her. She sank down in a webwork hammock, each strand achingly distinct, felt not only with her body but with the far greater clarity of her attunement to the machine. She had not cried since she was lost and dying in the forest, after the destruction of the Hidden Fortress; not since her father had refused to pay for decking headware, and she'd realized she faced four long years bound to the dreary life he'd chosen for her. She almost wanted to cry now, but the tears didn't come. The ones within cradled her in their strength--her strength now--and their love. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 43623 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!dali.cs.montana.edu!milton!phylo.genetics.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 80 Message-ID: <1991Jul29.220013.3443@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 29 Jul 91 22:00:13 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 87 80. Reflection She lay for a long time, swinging gently, half dreaming, letting the confusion in her thoughts settle like water after a storm. At last she rose, called up a reflective surface on the interior of the CPU, stood before it. Her hair was black, caught by a silver circlet and then falling down her back in unconfined waves. A hint of silver glittered in it, reflection of the system's light. Her skin was very pale, marked at wrists and temples with faerie traceries of silver. Burning softly against it was the hawk's mark, the talon's curve now completed and reflected to make the image of an eye. Below it, her own eyes were blue-silver and slightly mismatched, one brushed with sunlit gold, one with luminous white. She was wearing the delicate weave-work of her life, arranged into a gown that flowed gently over her body, gathered at the waist by a silver belt. It was herself, though she struggled to set a name to the image. *Jayhawk. I will be Jayhawk; it's the only one of my names I chose myself.* She was as lovely as Anubis around her; and that was fitting. She remembered Angela, who had looked into the mirror and despaired. Not a person, not then, only a tenuous overlay imposed on Caroline's mind from without. A mask shaped from the real Angela. But when the stimsense was broken she had become something more than that. A true AI, perhaps. *Though I didn't realize it, not until later, when Piebald and I were trying to remake ourselves. And I was dismayed. It's not that I wanted to be Angela; she seemed weak to me--no ambition, only daydreams. I wanted to be Jayhawk.* She remembered holding out her hand, far more afraid of the possibility of refusal than of anything that might follow acceptance. She remembered Piebald, though memory brought little understanding; he had told the truth when he claimed no memories, no understanding of who he was. He had scarcely been a person when they first met--only a bundle of thoughts, feelings, crazy insights like the password he'd given Jayhawk. The Angela construct had given him personhood, in the long slow rebuilding after they joined, as he had given her....She could put no name to it. Magic, perhaps. Roots in the paradoxical, the impossible. *I didn't even know what I was lacking, just that I felt empty. It was loyalty to Jayhawk and to Anubis that made me agree to the merger. She thought I belonged. I wanted to prove she was right.* She remembered Jayhawk, her desire for the embrace of the machine, and her despair....remembered the terror of dissolution. *I wasn't even afraid, I'd forgotten how to be afraid. Forgotten Caroline, myself, everything. Not strong enough.* She put one hand on the reflecting surface, felt the complex pulse of the system's life within it. It was her own pulse; she *was* within, as if she were using the Kurt code....as deep as she chose to be, experiencing it from whatever perspective suited her best at any moment. Effortlessly, she could reach out until the whole system was contained within her awareness--she did so, searching for signs of damage or intrusion, found none--could attune her consciousness to the machine's speed until seconds stretched like minutes, like hours. Closer than Jayhawk had imagined, but without the loss of self. She had nothing to fear from Anubis any longer. And she remembered Caroline, her defiant rejection of Aliantha's plans for her. *I did the right thing, refusing to hear her out; it was a trap for me, a self-fulfilling prophecy.* And yet she regretted it. She'd killed Aliantha once again in destroying the recording--it was gone, nothing left in storage but the four quotations and a technical note on how the recording had been generated. She might have preserved it, even Awakened it as she had the simulation of Angela. She no longer feared Aliantha's influence, certain in herself. She took a deep breath, turned away from the mirror. Whatever Aliantha's goals had been, she knew her own. She'd begin by reweaving her decking code--Caroline had destroyed it, even the carefully protected backup copies, during the remaking. And then she would try the Matrix, learn what she could do. She meant to free Martha. A test of her powers, and information that she might be able to trust. 'Heal *him*,' Martha had said, 'or kill him.' She intended to do so, confident in her power; but she needed understanding. Aliantha might have been able to tell her....but she thought she could trust Martha, if only she could set her free. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 44425 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!dali.cs.montana.edu!milton!phylo.genetics.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Shadowrun: sample magician Message-ID: <1991Aug14.010715.14515@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 14 Aug 91 01:07:15 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 118 This is a sample Shadowrun character to illustrate the changes we made to magicians. Asterisked values have been raised with Karma during the course of a 17-month campaign. Channa "Blackwood" Tomkins, Hermetic Sorceress Body 2 Quickness 3* Strength 2* Reaction 4 Willpower 4 Intelligence 6* Charisma 4* Magic Rating 5* Spell drain resisted with: Intelligence Conjury drain resisted with: Charisma [These can be any two stats (not the same one) but if a physical stat is used, all Drain is physical; and the side effects of cyberware enhancing such a stat would be unusually drastic. The idea is to reflect the way the individual does magic. Channa's approach to spellcasting is very intellectual, but she conjures out of the murk of her own unconscious (and isn't very good at it).] Skills: Sorcery 6 - spellcasting 7* Conjuring 5 - elementals 6* Magic theory 2 - design 4 - hermetic 6 Psychology 4* Etiquette - street 4 - corporate 3 Interrogate 1 - verbal 4* Stealth 2 - urban 4 Firarms 1 - pistol 3 English 8, Welsh 3, Latin 3 Magical Abilties: Spellcasting - all 5 spheres (restriction: no Physical spells) Conjury - elementals Astral Perception Astral Projection Ritual Magic (restriction: solitary only) [The restrictions are not point-balanced with anything; they're just a way of limiting and adding flavor to the character.] Spells: [note that some Drain codes have been increased] Control Thoughts 6S2 Control Emotions 4M1 Mind Probe 6M2 Mask 4L2 Mana Dart 6L1 (does Fatigue damage) Sleep 5D1, expendible fetish (glass spheres with powdered herbs) Heal 5, exclusive, expendible fetish (packets of herbs in alcohol) Analyze Truth 4M1, reusable fetish (wedding ring) [We allow more than the starting allotment of spell points, because with spells resisted off Force one needs considerable Force for the spell to work, and we don't like casters to have only 1-2 spells. Fetishes add additional dice, not additional Force: 2 dice for exclusive or expendable, one die for reusable. The Heal spell is a general-purpose but dangerous healing spell, following roughly the rules posted earlier by Carl Rigney.] Contacts: Charivala Green, Wiccan sorceress Jim Mwaba, Dog shaman Rudy Toynbee, Psychologist Murgen, proprietor Shangri-La Imports Irene King, Administrator, University of Seattle Description: Channa is the wife and partner of the private detective Casey Tomkins, who rescued her from the diabolist circle that first taught her magic. She's a mind mage, one of the rarest and most feared types of spellcaster; she keeps her powers relatively secret to avoid being feared or hated, though she can be ruthless when she feels hiding is impossible. She enjoys her power, though she tries to deny this even to herself. She relies on Interrogation whenever possible, since Mind Probe is a dangerous spell; the victim may notice it, and it also runs the risk of infecting the caster with the victim's mindset and neuroses. She dared to read the mind of a Will 9 adept once, and nearly went mad. Though she can be friendly and chatty with an effort, her natural demeanour is aloof and detached, except with Casey. This is a major limitation on her power; she doesn't understand or sympathize with other people well at a gut level, which reduces her ability to manipulate them. She's also rather afraid of her powers; she doesn't want to alienate Casey or her few other close friends, and she doesn't want to become as inhuman as the powerful mages she's met. She can't let other people get close enough to her for group ritual magic, though if Casey were mageborn she could probably work with him. The increase in Magic Rating from 4 to 5 came about during a run in which she hid on a balcony and started a large riot with Control Emotions (repeated castings, strategically placed), and then had to take desperate risks to get a friend away from the police while still exhausted. She knocked herself out cold--almost died. She'd never pushed her magic to that extreme before, and apparently it undid some inner resistance. Since then she's had a lot of trouble sleeping when other people are around, especially if Casey is not. She seems to pick up fragments of their nightmares. She and Casey have decided not to have children, afraid that they will be abnormal, as the children of the mageborn often are. They've recently met a 12-year-old fire sorceress who made their fears worse. Channa tends to use the Combat spells in combat (which she loathes) and the Control spells in non-combat situations; she's afraid of what will happen to her if someone she is mind-controlling is killed. In combat, she has the choice between needling away at enemies with Mana Dart and taking no fatigue, or using the major spells and taking fatigue. Out of combat, she personally prefers Control Thoughts (being an intellectual type herself) but will resort to Control Emotions when she needs not to take Drain. She doesn't cast either of them very often. The law is harsh on mindrape. Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu Article 45365 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wupost!uwm.edu!bionet!raven.alaska.edu!milton!phylo.genetics.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 81 Message-ID: <1991Aug29.223645.26646@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 29 Aug 91 22:36:45 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 86 [Episodes will be erratic for a while, as the campaign is mainly following the adventures of Duende's group in the Congo; they are getting too far behind this line, and need to be caught up.] 81. Software Jayhawk found that recreating her decking code was an adventure in itself. She remembered how she had written it--all but the attack code, which she'd disassembled so many times it was almost equally familiar--but now, as she laid out her frameworks, began filling them in, new possibilities kept occuring to her...shortcuts and elaborations, new principles and strange variations on old ones. As Piebald's ideas had always been, they were a mixed lot--some brilliant, some tantalizing but unworkable, some wildly incorrect. She learned to ride the waves of crazy insight, taking what worked, letting the rest go by. It was exhilirating. She had never been so inspired, and even if half the ideas were insane, it felt good. The attack code demanded the most revision. Laying out its structure, she realized that even her highly sophisticated program, Japanese software less than six months old, channeled its operations into a very few lines of attack, ignoring a world of possibilities all around it. It took her a long while--though the system clock reported only a few minutes, her personal time running fever-quick in her excitement--to craft a framework that could take advantage of all the opportunities she now perceived. She dashed off blocks of code with dizzy haste, tested them and was amazed to find them good. The finished product was strangely crooked and unstable, more like a lightning bolt barely constrained by its hilt than the sword she had carried. She drew it slowly through the air, feeling the patterns of disruption chained within it, and smiled. She missed the bells whose noise had followed her everywhere, revealed Lefty's imposture. But they seemed too likely to betray her on the Matrix. She crafted a single bell, a warning of Trace to wear at her belt; but its silence was not satisfying. At last, as she worked on deception code to allow her through system security, she found herself weaving bells into her routines, a chaotic music of sensor confusion. She could hide in the sound, like a message encoded in static. The final product, thrown over her shoulders like a cloak of braided glass trimmed with transparent bells, followed her movements with a pleasing, everchanging sound. She danced a little, listening to the bells. Jayhawk had never danced, never known how. It pleased her to find that she could. She wrote analysis code, lenses to focus every level she knew how to reach: the Matrix, the Overnet, even the shadowy subworld of hardware (though those routines were silent in Anubis, bereft of contact). She found that most of the canonical analysis routines were unnecessary--she needed no code to interpret her vision, beyond the code woven into the root of her being. But her vision could be enhanced, focused, and she worked diligently to do so. She surprised herself with aspects of Anubis which she had never seen, intimately though she knew them. Implicit in the dataflow like negative images, bright-winged and dark-eyed, the daemons echoed her dance. When she had finished the standard programs, she added a few of her own. The ghost code made to talk to Chalker, still untested--she added a few more subroutines, remembering the Life-game's conversation from both sides. Ancillary routines to communicate with the Matrix, the Overnet, speculative attempts to detect the operation of a Gate, traces to bring hidden nodes to light. She still had a copy of the Kurt code, threaded into Anubis by Jayhawk's possession. She would never again need it to unite her with Anubis; but it struck her that it had other uses now. With it, she might be able to pull a foreign system into alignment with her own, bring the power of Anubis to bear on the other machine in its entirety. The idea was both tempting and disturbing. Calling up the silver circlet that Jayahwk had worn, she tore it apart, reworked it to her new purpose. She wove in destruction, keyed to any touch but her own. Though she no longer had much fear of invaders--she was too powerful, too certain in her bond to the system--she did not want to give them such a tool to use elsewhere. It was a responsibility, this slender piece of software. She could see, now, what the Hawk had done to Caroline, the changes Jayhawk had sensed: not constraint, but awareness. She could do whatever she wanted, open-eyed to the consequences. She was deleriously happy. None of her daydreams, not even the seductions of stimsense, had come close to the joy of understanding, the delights of creation. There were so many things she could make, tools and toys and pieces of sheer artistry: ideas in abundance, cascades of them at her fingertips, tricks and algorithms and murkier processes that might verge on magic. Most of them would have to wait; but they were hers, all those possibilities. Like Aliantha, she could live forever if she chose. Unlike her, she had found no reason why she might choose otherwise. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 50274 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!zephyr.ens.tek.com!uw-beaver!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (synopsis) Message-ID: <1991Oct26.133610.12116@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 26 Oct 91 13:36:10 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 36 For those who tuned in late: The story is based, fairly closely, on a one-on-one Shadowrun game run by Jon Yamato. It follows one thread of the campaign, the story of the decker Jayhawk, called Caroline Davies in the mundane world, who toppled Aliantha, one of the leaders of the black cult called Montaigne Paradisio, and was taken by them to be her successor. Paradisio offered her power, both on the Matrix and in the shadowy realm beyond it that they called the Overnet, and she took that power and tried to use it to free herself. In the end it killed her physical body, and splintered her personality into independently-acting parts. Her struggle to become one again was aided by something that believed itself to be Angela Whitechapel, an undergraduate at the University of Washington, but proved to be an AI replicate created by Paradisio. When she succeeded in the reunification, the Angela-image, too, became part of her. As this part of the story begins, Jayhawk (as she has chosen to call herself, though many names would do, including the name of her computer system Anubis) returns to the Matrix to search for answers to urgent questions: What did Paradisio intend for her, and has she succeeded in escaping their control? What kind of being is she now, and what can she do? Where is the real Angela, and what has happened to her? She knows that Angela was kidnapped from a theater performance, presumably by Paradisio, and intends to track her down and, if necessary, rescue her. A pretty rough sketch of 81 postings, but the best I can do! Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu Article 50275 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!zephyr.ens.tek.com!uw-beaver!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk 82 Message-ID: <1991Oct26.133716.12258@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 26 Oct 91 13:37:16 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 234 82. Records Having resolved to find Angela, Jayhawk went hunting the records of her disappearance at the University District police station. It was a painfully drab system, inside and out: long, bare corridors noisy with the sound of paperwork and records-shuffling. Something about it bothered her, as she slipped through the SAN with the flow of reports and requests. The computer seemed...bored? Unhappy? All too anthropo- morphic, but that was the impression she was getting. She hesitated in a main routing node, trying to pin down the feeling. The operating system under which it was running was optimized for untrained people, and wasted the computer's time and space with abandon. A fair amount of its power was also dedicated to routine janitorial duties--coffee-makers and soda machines, elevators and lights. It was something of a shame--the machine was one she recognized, a good piece of work, though not particularly well designed for this kind of drudgery. Could she do something to improve matters? She poked around in the operating system, decided that without junking the user interface--which would doubtless get the machine dumped and rebooted--there wasn't much she could do to improve the software. She could--she caught herself, startled. She could change the hardware, if she chose. But the occupants of the building would no doubt be dismayed by the side effects. Could an exorcism get rid of her? She had no intention of finding out. A system process queried her intentions. Almost apologetically, she asked it to find the records for Angela Whitechapel. The machine's irritation bothered her, like a lingering unscratchable itch. Rather to her surprise, it accepted her request. A floor panel lit up, directing her inwards. There was no IC in her path; the machine almost seemed to have accepted her as a legitimate user. She found the records without difficulty, guided by the glowing floor. They were brief and disheartening. The case was closed: the police had interviewed Angela's friends and family, but found no leads. They'd only persisted as long as they had because of pressure by her parents, who had offered a million nuyen reward (Jayhawk, contemplating ways to find Angela, hardly noticed the number). The final note in the file mentioned that Interpol had been contacted, but that in the opinion of the officer in charge Angela was not going to be found. An ordinary runaway, like thousands in the city, interesting only because of her parents' wealth. Jay uploaded the files to Anubis anyway. Maybe they would mean more to a professional PI than they did to her. "Thanks," she said aloud to the machine, and made her way thoughtfully back out. There was no resistance from the IC, not even the routine queries she had faced on the way in. She *had* been accepted as a legitimate user, it seemed. Her next stop was in SeattleBank's main office, where she found that Angela's account had been redirected to her parents' and tapped with a small Trace. Sidestepping the Trace carefully, she was able to siphon off ten thousand nuyen before it became too risky to continue. She didn't like to steal, but what better use for what was, after all, Angela's money than to rescue Angela? She sent a message to Forked Lightning, asking to meet him that evening. Trying to hire a PI herself seemed tricky--what if the PI insisted on meeting with her in person, or checked up on her background? She planned to enlist physical help. The police system itched at her. After a fruitless search for some way she could help it, she put it firmly out of her mind and turned to an accessable problem: the records at Cavilard Base, Aliantha's headquarters. The Cavilard system was as she had last seen it, empty and quiet. She slipped in through the hedge guarding the 'back' entrance, walked along the worn dirt path. The deep indentations, like a single row of giant footprints, were still there. They seemed a little deeper. She came to the crossroads, stood still for a moment. To her right, a thin bridge spanned the abyss that had protected Aliantha's Gate. The Gate was supposed to be broken, but *something* tugged at her from that direction, like an unseen downhill slope to the level ground underfoot. To her left rose the Red Tower, Cavilard's main security node, a silo of intense red brick with a flat top. She remembered the winged black serpent which had guarded the Tower, and which she'd always assumed was IC until she hurt it and saw the decker behind the mask. A Paradisian had devoted his life to protecting that node. It was empty now, barred off with heavy police IC. She turned right, came to the edge of the abyss. The bridge was trapped, as she knew from experience. With an effort, she lifted herself into the air, hovered just above it. She could fly here, but it was hard, and the forward/downward pull was stronger. She touched down on the other side with relief. The path led on towards distant mountains, barren land around it. Although it seemed to be level, perhaps even sloping a little upwards, the tug increased with every step until she was bracing herself against the fall. The Gate was active; she could feel its presence, the warping of Matrix space downward toward something else. Not the Overnet, not exactly. She turned back before the pull became too great to resist. She'd come for datastores, not Gates, no matter how intriguing. Not yet. The police IC was quite impressive--a total block, meant to make the machine unusable. She contemplated taking it down and trying to neutralize the inevitable alarms, then began looking for ways to avoid that. Carefully, she reached out to the crossroads node. It had been a routing processor, handling traffic to other parts of the system. Given the authorization, it could route her as well. The task would have been easier nearer the open Gate, drawing on its power; but more dangerous, since that power pulled so strongly in one direction. Where she was, it was a difficult trick. She wished that Anubis were here, and not tethered to a fast-food restaraunt system in Yokohama. Even at such distance, she could bring a little of Anubis' power to bear, though there were stringent limits. It was enough. With an almost absent-minded flick--Cavilard system was still tremendously powerful, even blocked and silenced as it was--the routing node accepted her authorizations, placed her inside the Tower. It was completely empty, scars on the floor where something had been removed. Police tape decorated its other exits. She looked around quickly, then more slowly, searching for the Matrix trickery that was a Paradisian trademark. There was a trapdoor in the ceiling, high overhead--obvious once noticed, but so far out of reach that most deckers wouldn't have thought to look for it. She levitated to reach it, forced it open. The tower-top was bare, except for a small squeeze-bulb--a program of some kind. She probed into it, tasted raw power contained in a complex piece of code. Not Matrix power, something more formless. Magic? She checked it over carefully, found no links that could betray her presence, no traps. It went into a belt pouch for future reference. She was no longer particularly afraid of Paradisian innovations; it seemeed to her that she had already faced the worst they could create. The Tower looked out over most of the system, almost like the watchtowers of Anubis. She could see the path leading towards the Gate. Something was coiled at its threshhold, sleeping--she had felt its presence in the instant of the teleport, and from here there was no mistaking it. The guardian she had fought on her previous visit? She wasn't sure. In the other direction, the main system was spread out for her inspection. There was another route toward the Gate, and connectors into nodes she had visited before, when she and Yoichi hunted the system, then living, for information on its masters. The step-pyramid of the CPU rose above them all, though its feathered guardian was gone. She descended, wove her way through stillness to the center. She had never managed to get into the CPU before. It was a single chamber, almost a duplicate of the altar room where she'd seen Yoichi sacrified: a wide, low room like a converted warehouse, with an empty altar at its center. Behind the altar was an empty framework bolted to the wall. It had held something, an Overnet construct she thought; but it was broken now. The edges of the room had at one time been filled with equipment, but it, too, was gone. The datastores had been gutted. Piqued, Jayhawk sat down on the floor, considered her surroundings. She couldn't tell what the framework had been intended to be--it looked almost like a Gate, the broken Gate she had expected to find in Cavilard, but then what was that on the mountain path? And who would put a Gate into their CPU? It seemed like a horrendous security risk. She remembered being part of Anubis, probing back into her own system's past. There were no records left at Cavilard, but once the information she wanted *had* been here. Might the machine remember? It seemed illogical on the face of it, but oddly plausible. Cavilard was sleeping, and she couldn't wake it without waking the guardian at the Gate, which she didn't feel quite ready to do. Did it dream? A still pool, dark, dark, nothing moving, the life of the system shut down to the barest maintenance level. Reach below the surface, stir the depths.... Anubis broke the connection between her and the Cavilard system, protecting her; she came to herself suddenly, a death-scream ringing in her ears. Nightmare, the system dreamed nightmare, the destruction of the base. For a moment she toyed with the memory, hearing the echo from Anubis, then decided against pursuing that further, at least for now. Two hundred people had died in the fall of Cavilard. She didn't want to face them. The emptiness ached. She wanted to wake the system, guardian or no guardian; but it seemed irresponsible to play with it while Angela was still imprisoned and needed her help. She nudged the CPU into letting her out past the police blocks, considered her next move. The records were somewhere, she felt sure; probably in the hands of the police. She went searching, found that the Bellevue police system was a sibling of the one she'd run in the University District. Like the other, it felt morose, irritable with overwork and inefficiency; but it yielded up its secrets with little fuss. The records were voluminous--apparently the police had taken every scrap Cavilard had. She uploaded them laboriously to Anubis, followed them herself. It felt good to be back, the flow of the system's processes like an echo of her own thoughts, its power supporting her as she began the massive task of sorting through her find. Operation Sunflower was referenced once, as a heading attached to five megapulses of blank space and the line "Deleted by order of the NSA." Her own name appeared five times. Once on a comprehensive list of Seattle deckers. Twice on inter-office memos, apparently from Aliantha to some crony, complaining that Lefty had been assigned to hunting "Jayhawk's group" and was screwing the job up. "Why is he taking so long? After the others are disposed of we can pick her up at our leisure," Aliantha had written. Another note from the same source, all but the header and signature of which had been deleted--it began with her name, and ended with two question marks and an exclamation point. Scrutinizing it more carefully, she found the comment encoded in that text, impossibly concise--it seemed unreasonable to her that she could decode it--but unmistakable. It said "Recruit sequence one." And last, her name all alone in the middle of a long blank file, with two question marks before it and two after. It seemed to her, as she sat running the text through processing like sand through a seive, that there had been other names removed, one by one, until only hers was left. She laughed a little, imagining Aliantha's frustration with Lefty and his cat-and-mouse games; then her mood turned to anger, at Aliantha and Lefty, at the NSA, at everything conspiring to keep the truth from her. She'd never run a top-security government installation. But it would be easier than running Paradisio. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 50324 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!apple!mips!samsung!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!usenet.coe.montana.edu!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (83) Message-ID: <1991Oct27.223126.15897@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 27 Oct 91 22:31:26 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 116 83. Bargain That evening Jayhawk went looking for Forked Lightning, found him skateboarding in the corridors of Osiris at the University. She managed to sneak up on him, much to his dismay. "How do you *do* that? It's supposed to be top-notch sensor code, straight from the Phillipines. Is there something wrong with it?" "I don't think so; I'm cheating, that's all. Sorry." She tilted her head, looked at him quizzically. She'd expected some reaction to the changes in her appearance, but he seemed oblivious. "How are you doing?" "Spent the whole night sitting up waiting for a break-in that didn't happen. What a bore. Is it always like that?" "No, sometimes they do come and you wish they hadn't...." She laughed at his crestfallen expression. "Sounds like you might be seeing some action soon enough." "Yeah, I hope so. Hey, what about you? What you were going to do--did it work? Are you okay?" She spun in a whisper of bells, the wind of her motion tingling in the gossamer of her dress, and realized he could see none of that. "It worked--I'm free! At least I think so. Yes, I'm okay, better than okay in fact." It felt strange to be talking to him this way. She was not exactly the person he had known, though she didn't feel that she could really explain that. "I learned a lot.--Fork, could I ask a favor of you?" "Sure!" His grin was wide and bright. The detailing of his Matrix image had improved, or maybe only her perceptions. Caught by a sudden thought, she probed into that image, testing it. As far as she could tell, she really was talking to Michael, not to someone else wearing his form. "What do you need?" "I need a PI hired, to look for that girl I was talking to you about-- Angela Whitechapel. I'd do it myself, but if they wanted to see their client...." He laughed, though there was an edge of nervousness to it. "Yeah, I see your problem. I don't know much about PIs, though. You have someone in mind?" She'd only ever known one PI, and Paradisio had uprooted him from home and job, forced him into an unwilling role in Duende's private war. She toyed briefly with the idea of calling Casey, but she doubted he could help her. She wasn't at all sure he'd even be willing to talk to her. She could hardly blame him. "Not really. Maybe you could ask around, see who gets recommended to you, check out the bulletin boards?" He nodded seriously. "I have a little money--I don't know how much they charge--" "Taken care of, at least the first ten K. I hit her bank account-- figure she wouldn't mind having the money spent on finding her. Anyway, you can offer to split the reward. Her parents have a million nuyen out on 'information leading to the safe recovery of...'" Forked Lightning whistled piercingly. "A *million*? Who is this girl, anyway? Some oyabun's daughter?" "Corporate, and on a big guilt trip about her, I think." She hesistated, thinking about the money for the first time. "It *is* an awful lot." Angela remembered an almost possessive concern, but a million nuyen worth? Why would her father do that? "I'll work on it, sure. May take a bit, I'm not supposed to moonlight on duty, but I've got plenty of free time." The defiance in his grin suggested that he'd dropped out of his classes, or resigned himself to cheating his way to a degree. She considered criticizing him on the point, decided it was none of her business. "What do you want in return?" "Oh, it's no problem, I...." His voice trailed off as he looked at her speculatively. "Hm, maybe you could do *me* a favor." "What is it? Won't know until you ask." "Oh, not yet. Just a favor for the future, that's all. Never know when it might come in handy." "If you're willing to take the risk I might not be around--sure." She had a guess what she might be letting herself in for--teaching him the Overnet--but refusing to promise wouldn't get her off that hook, not if she wanted to retain his friendship, and she *needed* to find Angela. Forked Lightning held out his hand, shook hers firmly. "It's a deal, then. I'll get on it as soon as I can. Be seeing you around?" "Probably. I have a lot of things to do." She turned to go, felt his gaze on her. "You going to Trace me again? It won't work." "Can't fault me for trying, can you? I've refined the code quite a lot. My bosses don't mind me moonlighting as long as it's on better IC for them!" In a more serious voice, "I'm going to figure out how you do that, by hook or by crook. It may take me a while, but I'm going to do it." "I'll be impressed." "You will?" His grin widened. "Go ahead, lose me." He uncoiled a program from his backpack, set it down. With skittering speed, drawing on Anubis' capacities, she led the hapless Trace to the adjacent node, reprogrammed it, and sent it off to the Stuffer Shack with an order for fries. It *was* better code, but nothing like up to her. Perhaps without Anubis' backing it would have had a chance; she wasn't sure. It was hard to imagine being without Anubis, almost as hard as imagining being like Forked Lightning again. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 50325 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!apple!mips!think.com!samsung!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!usenet.coe.montana.edu!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (84) Message-ID: <1991Oct27.223254.16228@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 27 Oct 91 22:32:54 GMT References: <1991Oct27.223126.15897@milton.u.washington.edu> Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 205 83. Orrery The location of the NSA central computer was not, of course, on file in the public databases. Jayhawk ended up breaking into the Seattle office and tracing out their contacts. They led to Washington DC, to a machine that she contemplated from the outside for a little while and decided that she would need her full resources. She went back to Anubis. Paradisio used beacons to navigate the emptiness between Gates, and presumably on the Overnet as well. She didn't know how to make something visible at a distance, and was somewhat afraid of the consequences if she did manage the trick. She'd been lucky in dealing with Overnet intruders, so far. But she *could* make a remote directly linked to Anubis, a thread to follow across the Overnet. She would need to move quickly, before anything else traced it out to her. The eventual construct was a compact piece of code, something she might hope to hide in a busy node, though on the Overnet it stood out like a sore thumb. That shouldn't matter, she told herself, and went off to test it. She crept into the NSA system in a shiver of bells, a whisper of static on the lines. There was a trap at the SAN the likes of which she had never seen before, something approaching Overnet manipulation; a maze of false connections to lead the unwary in and out again without ever reaching the interior of the system. No threat to her, but she was impressed. After examining it carefully, she began to map out the system's complexity. The machine was immense, both in power and in content, and it felt somehow--inhabited? Something was sleeping, deep inside it. She chose her direction based on that, found herself at an internal SAN even more heavily defended than the main Matrix connection. Guarding it was a pacing figure she identified as a decker; a lion- headed man, heavily muscled, with flames licking in his mane. She ducked back, placed her beacon in a nearby auxillary node where it would hopefully be lost in the continual shifting of the dataflow, then fled as quickly as she could out through the gates, back to Anubis. A silver thread stretched from her SAN 3 into the greyness of the Overnet, just as she had imagined. She let herself blur into the machine until she could see in all directions, knew the status of every indicator, like a rigger wired into a strange vehicle. Winding the link in as she traced it, she moved toward her target. Ahead, she spotted a brightness on the line, like a patch of hoarfrost. She materialized from the lightshimmer of the SAN, walked gracefully out along the line until she could see it more clearly. The grey void opened below her, but learning to fly had robbed it of its fear. The brightness was crystals of ice--of IC? she wondered: was it symbolic or literal?--thickly encrusting the link between her and the NSA system. She threw out a loop of new line, spliced it in place before and behind, cut the contaminated segment free with her blade. As the broken line faded into nothingness, the frost coalesced into a small, glittering cloud, drifting sedately back. She drew the link out of its way; as if noticing her movement, it veered, tried to settle over her head. Her blade gouged a huge swath in it, but it didn't seem deterred; unwilling to be touched, she spun around the line until her head was pointing 'downwards', retreated back to Anubis. The ice settled slowly back onto the connector, blocking her way. It seemed harmless as long as it had something to perch on. Well, she could give it something to perch on--something other than Anubis; she didn't want to reel that line in, contaminated as it was. She put together a tiny beacon, a bit of code that could exist independently in the Overnet. It would dissolve in minutes, too small to maintain itself, but that should be enough. Carefully avoiding the patch of crystals--were they growing? it was hard to tell--she cut the line again, linking first one end, then the other to her beacon. Sustained by her construct, the line hung in the greyness, sparkling with frost. She directed Anubis around it, went back to her journey. The tiny point of red light and silver reflection dropped behind, faded from sight. She imagined returning accidentally to this place in the trackless Overnet and finding some huge snare constructed of lines and beacons like the one she had given it. It was not a pleasing thought. From the Overnet, the NSA system appeared as a pair of crystalline spheres, one within the other, both turning. The outer sphere was engraved with stars and planets; she couldn't quite make out the details of the inner one. There was no connection between them; in fact, they were not turning on the same axis, so a stable connection would have been difficult to construct. Puzzled, she probed deeper, found the internal SAN she had seen from within. It led to a translucent whirlpool, swirling down from the outer sphere to brush the turning surface of the inner. She whistled softly in admiration. A difficult construction to get into, even more difficult to get out of--the vortex led downward, and trying to fight its flow looked to be a real challenge. There was a word for the image she was seeing, out of Angela's memories: the NSA system was an orrery, a model of the celestial spheres. She wondered what that implied about its creators. When she tried to anchor Anubis to the outer sphere, an unexpected barrier flared into life, pushed her back. It was coded with the same protocols as the external SAN she had already run; she was able to circumvent it, bind Anubis to the routing node where her link led. But it was clearly Overnet code, crudely constructed but surprisingly powerful. Paradisians in the NSA? It seemed unlikely; more probably they had come up with it independently, or pulled something out of the captured files. She found it obscurely comforting to know that her enemies didn't have a monopoly on their power, difficult though it made her task now. She slipped down the link into the orrery. Close proximity to Anubis lent her power and understanding; she could feel the movement of the system around her, a strange feeling on the Matrix, and the sleeping presence within was almost close enough to touch. She could awaken it, if she chose. With a shiver, she set that idea aside. The inner SAN carried IC that she had never seen or heard of, as she found when she coaxed the node into indexing itself: icebreakers and icefloes, catalysts and rerouters. All were linked to a kind of tripwire--startled, she seached harder but could find no way to deactivate it. How did its owners use the inner sphere? Dedicated I/O directly to it, no use made of the Matrix links at all? She stepped past it, on the shivery interface between Matrix and Overnet, supported by Anubis' presence. The decker stirred, eyes flickering about; there were flames in his pupils, wisps of smoke rising up where his gaze rested. She tried to lose herself amidst the IC, skirting the dangerous edge of merging with the machine, felt his gaze sweep over her like a wash of furnace air and pass by. Clinging to the SAN, she contemplated the upper reaches of the whirlwind, which appeared on the Matrix as a smooth-walled, faintly pulsing tube leading downwards. Something dreamed there, a heartbeat rhythm to the pulsation. She invoked the code she had made to speak with ghosts, sent words fluttering downwards like scraps of paper: Hello? Will you talk to me? There was no reply. She could awaken it, but not stir its dreams to answer. Anubis reported something approaching at the edge of its perception. She reached out, shared its vision. Moving through the greyness of the Overnet was a three-lobed construct, pearly-grey teardrops clustered together like a thick dart, their points fused together and directed towards Anubis. Behind it came another set, and another. Their surfaces gleamed like oil in the luminous greyness of the Overnet. She gave up thought of entering the inner sphere, at least for the moment. She wasn't sure how easy it would be to return, and she wouldn't let Anubis face possible attack alone. Slipping past the decker on the wings of her link with her system, she returned to the Overnet, watched them approach. Compared to her they were slow. A message probed out from one of them towards the orrery; she intercepted it, worked to decrypt it as she waited for their reaction. They veered toward her, another message pouring out, bending toward Anubis as she exerted control. They were *deckers*, she realized in startlement, though hidden almost completely within powerful but painfully crude Overnet constructs. She sent a message of her own, hesitating for an instant as she searched for a name for herself. She didn't want to give them the one that might appear in the Paradisian files. *I am Anubis. Who are you?* There was no response. Could she capture them, perhaps talk to them, without letting them spread the alarm? She wove a false node out of her power, an extension of Anubis, like a silver and black net to draw them within reach. Her first target dodged out of her way, speeding up dramatically; they scattered as she reached for another, caught it like a struggling fish and pulled it into her radius of control. She'd often considered what she would do if she caught one of the Paradisians, and put the plan to use now: teleport, continuous teleportation back to the same place, locking the teardrop into one of her containment nodes. A message stabbed out from one of the others, not towards the orrery but back into the greyness of the Overnet. She let it go, concentrating on her captive. It seemed disoriented by the teleportation, spinning wildly in the center of the containment chamber, unable to escape. A lurid white beam shot out from the tip of the bottommost teardrop, lanced into the endless waterfall of her barrier IC and shattered it into a thousand coruscating fragments. Shocked, she dissolved the adjacent barriers before they could be destroyed--it was easier to restore them without the collateral damage. The next beam struck steel and glass, the stuff of Anubis itself--and dug in, breaking connections, fusing the intricate patterns into slag. Reflexively she seized the teardrop, flung it to the limits of her perception--I didn't know I could do that!--drove all of Anubis in the other, fleeing the orrery and its protectors. Her thoughts were clear, but crimson with pain and the wrongness of damage. It had *hurt* her, damaged the actual structure of the system, something she had not dreamed was within its power. There was no pursuit. Eventually she found a system to bind Anubis to, a sadly underutilized supercomputer used as a demo model by a retailer. The presence of actual hardware seemed to make repairs easier; the other machine was an anchor, steadying her for the task. A more exact analog of Anubis would have been better. She had the power to create such a thing, she realized, but it would be vulnerability as well as asset, as her own flesh had been. No. She was not willing to give Paradisio--or anyone else--the chance at such a hold over her again. She lay off the other system, slowly rebuilding the damaged connections, driving the pain and disorientation of the injuries back. Nothing moved in the greyness outside, though she kept careful watch. She didn't want to meet them again until she was prepared. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 50326 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!apple!mips!think.com!samsung!caen!usenet.coe.montana.edu!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (85) Message-ID: <1991Oct27.223610.17015@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 27 Oct 91 22:36:10 GMT References: <1991Oct27.223126.15897@milton.u.washington.edu> Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 120 85. Repairs "Can I get you to do me a small favor?" said Jayhawk to Forked Lightning during their evening meeting. "Sure!" "Can you get into the basement lab in the English Department? There's a printer there I want you to have a look at." She'd located it that afternoon. It was an old model, probably used only towards the end of the quarter when printers of any kind were at a premium, and silent now: an essential connection was missing, probably corroded away in the damp, though the power was still on. Forked Lightning opened his mouth to question, thought better of it. "No problem, they never lock that when classes are in. What do you want me to look for?" "Figure out what's wrong, then power it back up and give me a ring-- there's a terminal down there. I'm going to try a little experiment." Alone, she slipped into the English Department's network, unseen by its familiar IC, and nestled herself in the I/O node controlling the ancient printer. With deliberate care she explored the connection, reached out into the machine. It was barely a computing device at all, nothing but a small collection of fonts and some queuing capacity. The missing circuitry should have blocked her awareness, as it blocked tranmission of documents from the mainframe into the printer, but it did not. She was able to explore the break from both sides, probe into the fine details until she felt she knew the machine inside and out. Abruptly it tried to power-down; she almost prevented it from doing so, then realized that Forked Lightning must be responsible and withdrew. He seemed to take a long time at his examination. She spent much of it wondering if she could really have kept the printer running after he disconnected its power line. She could, she decided. Anubis gave her that. The machine came humming back up to life, red fault indicators flaring in the I/O node. Jayhawk took a deep breath, visualized the pattern of the printer as she had seen it, the obvious break in the dataflow, and reached out to touch the reality. Drawing on Anubus, she tried to bridge the gap. For an instant she hung suspended, dangling over the impossibility that she was attempting; then, suddenly, it was simple. The pattern was still there, part of the printer, implicit in its design; it was the easiest thing in the world to restore it. Anubis' power utilization surged briefly, settled back to ground state as lights faded to green around her. She found herself dizzy, every nerve tingling. It felt *right*, like rearranging the islands, like learning to fly--not a drain on her resources at all, almost a source of power. She let herself be drawn in by the newly-freed dataflow to see what she had done. Something had changed, beyond the flawless repair of the missing circuit--from the Matrix, she couldn't guess how that had been accomplished, though she knew that it would hold without her intervention. There was something latent in the old printer, almost a presence--not awake, not even close to awareness, but a potential she had not felt before, the barest spark of life. Careful to disturb it no further, she withdrew, found Forked Lightning staring at her. "*What did you do?*" he demanded breathlessly. "That's what I sent you to find out," she said dreamily. "There's a printed circuit on the inside of the printer cover, with a little bump of wire that just touches a contact on the masterboard, so when you close the cover it completes the circuit. *You* did that! How did you do it?" His voice was almost angry in its intensity. "I don't really know." It was hard to focus on what he was saying, as if she had not quite successfully disentangled her awareness from the machine. It was an oddly pleasant sensation. "I just saw what had to be done to complete the pattern, and did it. I suppose I'm more of a magician than I realized." "You changed the hardware from the Matrix. If you can do that...." Words failed him. "You could do *anything*. Jeeze, you could rebuild my deck, or my headware--" He reached out to grab her arm, thought better of it at the last moment. "Couldn't you?" "Don't know. Headware's not the same as hardware; it's part of *you* too. I don't know what that would do to you. It did something to the printer...." At his puzzled look, she tried to put her perceptions into words. "Awakened it, almost, though it's not really big enough to be AI or anything like that. There's something there, though, like the spirit of a house, maybe. I knew a shaman once that talked to houses.... Something that wasn't there before. I need to know more before I go screwing around like that again, I need to know what I'm doing." It had felt so good, so natural.... "God, I'm spaced." "Matrix spirits." He drew back, just a little. "Imagine them waking up everywhere and trying to get back at us for the way we've exploited them...." That didn't fit her perceptions at all; but Michael was frightening her with the intensity of his greed, and it seemed like a useful caution. "It might be like that, I don't know." "How am I ever--how can I ever learn to do that? That's it! that's what I want for my favor. Teach me!" "I don't know if I can." It was hard to face the intensity of his desire, knowing where it might lead him. She thought of Aliantha, and Megan. "I'll teach you what I can, the parts I can put in words." Suddenly his presence was very hard to bear. "Can you excuse me? I really am spaced, and I need to rest. That wasn't as easy as I thought it would be." It was a lie; it had been the easiest thing in the world. She wanted to do it again. But a subtle fear nagged at her, an image of herself as an extension of the Matrix, a repair utility perhaps. It would be an easy role to lose herself in, she could sense; and there was no end to it. -- Copyright 1991 Mary Kuhner Article 50602 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!casbah.acns.nwu.edu!raven.alaska.edu!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (86) Message-ID: <1991Oct30.234526.10980@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 30 Oct 91 23:45:26 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 216 86. Dust Driven by the need to understand, Jayhawk wrote to Dr. McDougall, the psychiatrist she had dealt with earlier, and asked to talk to him. She ended up with a daily appointment, over what she guessed must be his lunch hour--perhaps he didn't want to admit to spending time with an insubstantial, unverifiable, and non-paying patient. She'd expected a barrage of tests, some clever attempt to verify her story, pin down her nature. Instead he mainly listened to her. She'd tapped into his terminal's graphics routines so that he could actually see and hear her, though with the equipment at hand there was no way she could hear his replies, and she had to be content with his one-finger typing. Sometimes he would ask questions, but they were seldom the ones she had expected. He asked her whether she thought Angela was a real person, whether Jayhawk herself might have forged the Matrix documents that proved her existance, as well as the email Forked Lightning had recieved from Angela's friends. "Why would I do that?" she said in puzzlement. >I'm not certain. I'm just trying to cover all the possibilities. Whereupon he put forward the even odder suggestion that Angela might have been a *physical* projection of her own personality, an independent person but created by her. >I've heard of such cases. The age difference is quite characteristic. "I don't *think* so, I've certainly never had any evidence of it....I never met Angela before Paradisio, or even heard of her; it's hard for me to believe we had anything to do with each other." He had similar questions about Piebald, though her answers were different; she knew the truth now of his claim to Jayhawk that he, too, was Jayhawk. "I saw him at Paradisio, apparently in the flesh; but I'm not sure. I'm confused about a lot of the things that happened there--whether they were stimsense, or Matrix or physical reality. They tried to keep me confused." She told him the story of putting wall hangings up in her Matrix room, and having the physical analog delivered to her door. >Interesting that he's male. Intuition is usually seen as a feminine >attribute. "Usually? This kind of thing happens to other people?" >Not exactly, as far as I'm aware, no. He had a lot more questions than answers, she soon realized. "Can't you do anything to find out what I am experimentally?" >I'll ask Dr. Marsh--he's a colleague of mine who has some experience in >these matters--and we'll see what he can do. Over the next lunch break he introduced her to Marsh, whom she remembered from her researches into the group was a sorceror of some kind. After five long minutes' silence, Marsh reported that he could sense no trace of her presence. "If I manifested physically, could you do better?" She remembered manifestation, and the price it seemed to carry...but she wanted to know what she could do, and she was intensely curious about what they would see. On and off, she suspected that McDougall really didn't believe her story, and was just stringing her along to observe this interesting new cyberpsychosis. >Can you do that? Without harming yourself? You expressed some concern >about that earlier. "I'm willing to take the risk." She had to wait while Marsh and McDougall hiked across campus to their office. She spent her time exploring their machine--McDougall had given her the passwords, though she certainly didn't feel she needed them. It was rather a desolate place, apparently little used, not the machine they received their daily traffic of email on. By the time they were ready, she was comfortably familiar with it, and resolved not to harm it by what she was doing. She collected herself, visualized the screen as a window through which she could walk, and stepped forward. Instantly, warnings flared across her nerves, utilization levels at Anubis skyrocketing as the system tried to create a near-complete duplicate of itself. She felt the strain as connections frayed, disruptions began to propagate through the delicate network of her machine. There was a sharp sound, like breaking glass, a sharp brief pain with it. *I didn't want to break anything!* She was standing on thick carpet in the midst of chaos. The room was small and cluttered, bookcases lining the walls. Every book had been thrown down, every paper dislodged, and the air was heavy with dust and lint. Three men were staring at her warily from the far side of the room. She recognized McDougall by the red hair she'd seen in his Net photograph. The tall, lanky one who was--He was casting at her! She tensed instinctively, felt her toes dig into the carpet, a breath of wind on her skin. Nothing more, no spell attacking her. The third man, small and dark in drab coveralls, glanced behind her. She followed his gaze, saw a dead terminal, its facepiece shattered into tiny shards. Anubis was struggling to maintain her form, slow progressive deterioration setting in. She looked down at herself, saw something human-shaped, nearly translucent, drab-colored but faintly sparkling. Slowly, careful to strain Anubis no further, she dropped to one knee, touched the carpet. It felt like carpet, though she was aware of the frenzied processing which maintained that simple sensory contact. "Jayhawk?" said McDougall uncertainly. "Yes. What happened? I'm sorry about the terminal, I didn't mean to do that." Her voice sounded much as she expected, though softer--she had to strain to be heard clearly. "Quite all right--it comes off the grant. There was a--well, a sort of whirlwind." His hair was standing nearly on end, one strand slipping down over his eyes. He brushed at it absently. "Are you all right?" "This is hard, harder than I expected--it's costing me a good deal to hold." She looked around, smiled at the other two, who tentatively smiled back. "This is Dr. Marsh, and this is Dr. Jones from the computer center--I think you've talked to him before." McDougall took a cautious step forward, staring at her. "What do I look like? What do you see?" She had mainly been talking to Marsh, but McDougall answered first: "Something like a cloud of dust particles, very thick, in the shape of a woman. There's quite a glitter to it, as if it were metallic, though I don't think it could be. Rather lovely, actually." Marsh dropped his eyes, said in an unexpectedly husky voice, "The nearest thing I've ever seen to you is a great spirit of the air, though that's not very close. Not a magician, but extremely magical. If you're human you're an enormously powerful one. Interesting." "I must have made this form out of the dust in your office." She would have done better with something more compatible with her nature, she realized. Given flesh, she might be able to stay embodied as long as she wished. She thought of Angela--not only flesh, but practically identical to her own lost body--and shivered. There was no great joy in it, other than the satisfaction of her curiosity, and the wonder of being able to do something so clearly arcane. She raised her arms, turned slowly, feeling Anubis labor to maintain her shape. To herself she felt solid enough, but she could see the strings behind that illusion. There was very little here but will and dust. "I like to shake hands with my patients," said McDougall, "if you wouldn't mind--?" She extended her hand cautiously, ready to react if he squeezed her--she wasn't sure Anubis could handle that, and wasn't going to risk her system to find out. But he barely touched her, a soft brush across her fingertips. "What do I feel like?" He licked his lips, considering words. "Like a bundle of static electricity, I think. Does that disturb you?" "No....I don't think I should stay here; I'm damaging Anubis. Repairable, but I'd rather it didn't get any further." "Can you get back all right?" He glanced at the broken terminal. She reached out to touch it, found that it was still linked to the Matrix; only the picture tube and screen were gone. It was easy to return, simply let go of the task of manifestation, let Anubis return to ground state, dust return to dust. She found herself within the machine, the familiar comfort of the Matrix around her. With the terminal broken, she had no way to communicate with them. Guessing that it would take them another ten minutes to walk back to the computer center, she returned to Anubis, began dealing with the damage. It was not severe, though she was troubled by a nagging sense that something had been irreparably lost, some small but precious part of her being. As she re-established links, knit the complex redundancies and cross-checking back into form, she considered that. She was no longer native to the physical world. Did she need to be? Was it a problem to be tackled, or just another facet of her nature? If it was a problem, it certainly wasn't the most urgent one. Running her personal time up high, she had a good start at the repairs before it was time to return to McDougall. She found him at the computer center, as she had expected; blind to the outside, she couldn't tell if the others were there. >Are you all right? "Yes, though doing that costs me something permanent, some loss--I don't really know what it is." >Your soul? Was she talking to Marsh? "I don't know. I don't really know what a soul is, I guess." >I need to go now. Please don't worry about the terminal or the books-- >it's well worth it as a learning experience, for all of us. "How do you put that down on the grant?" There was a slight pause. >Experimental expenditures. Take care, Jayhawk. Tomorrow? "Tomorrow." She returned to the island-garden, to sit in the warm sun and consider what she had done. The sunlight seemed subtly less bright, as if her act had tarnished it ever so slightly. She wouldn't be doing that again soon, she decided. Perhaps not at all, if she couldn't learn how to avoid the cost. She didn't need to. She had the Overnet and the Matrix, world in plenty for anything she wanted to do. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 50601 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!casbah.acns.nwu.edu!raven.alaska.edu!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (87) Message-ID: <1991Oct30.234113.9635@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 30 Oct 91 23:41:13 GMT References: <1991Oct30.233851.8923@milton.u.washington.edu> Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 158 87. Congo Yoichi checked the windows once more before settling into the front seat. The Congo was swarming with insects, many of them aggressive and a few poisonous. Awane had found a spider in Channa's purse that morning which would, he said, have killed her in seconds. Channa had not been pleased. The windows were tightly sealed, air coming in through filters that almost removed the relentless stink of vegetation and standing water. He leaned his forehead against the armor glass, staring out into the impenetrable darkness. "No Matrix link. I didn't know there was anywhere in the world without a Matrix link." "It's a strange place." Mazeratti was lying cradled in the rigger's nest, but his voice whispered from the console speaker. Since they'd entered the jungle he'd hardly jacked out at all, driving, sleeping, keeping watch all within the machine. "What's the matter? Can't sleep?" Yoichi looked at him, unmoving body barely visible amidst the support mechanism, and said softly, "I need someone to talk to, and the others...they're in the same boat as I am, they can't help me. Someone who's outside this whole mess." He turned away, staring into the dark. "Do you mind?" "I'd be glad of the company myself." Even in the vehicle it was hot, though not as stifling as the outside. This was their last day on passable road. Yoichi was not looking forward to the three days' march through jungle that would take them to Forvalaka's lair and the Paradisian Congo base. He drove his thoughts away from that, said slowly, "I had a girlfriend, a decker named Jayhawk, back in Seattle. She's the one who got the others to rescue me, when Paradisio picked me up. I didn't know anything about them at all before that, though I think she did. We ran their main system together, saw what they could do, pulled off a few good ones against them. We were with Duende on the last attack, the one that destroyed the Seattle base. She got crushed in an emergency door, had to be hospitalized--she was wired up high, didn't heal very well. Jay always hated being cooped up, and they wouldn't let her deck from the hospital. When she got out, she was so gung-ho to do something...I remember.... "The High Priestess, Aliantha, had holed up in this place outside Seattle we called the Hidden Fortress. We were going to do a run against them, and Jay was handling security, decked in from a van ten miles away. She....I don't know what she did exactly. The whole base blew up. We were a mile away, and nearly too close as it was. "When we got back to the van, the whole thing was in ruins and she was dead. Something had come back down the lines, maybe some defense of theirs, I don't know." "I'm sorry," whispered Mazeratti's voice from the speakers. Yoichi turned away, unable to frame a reply. After a long moment the African continued: "When I was growing up, there was a girl named Sarabande in my town. Somehow we always got assigned to the same classes--it was kind of a joke, though we pushed for it too; we worked well together. Same assignment right out of school, working for the same company. Same doc to do the wiring, though she wasn't a rigger--too tame for her, she liked to be right in the middle of things. "We were out here, hunting, when something got her, scooped her up. She went all limp. I think she might have fainted. She wasn't one to faint easily. I shot at the thing that had her, but it didn't stop. I thought...I could move the laser just a little bit, a fraction of an inch." Outside the window, the vehicle's targetting laser traced a slow pattern across the dark trees. "Before I could decide she was gone." "Jay was always the better of the two of us," Yoichi said. "I can't match what she could do, no matter how hard I try." "Yes. I know how that feels." "I could have accepted it, though. She gave her life for something she thought was worthwhile...." His voice trailed off; out of the corner of his eye he saw a sound panel swivel a little to focus on him, amplify his whispers. "I could have come to terms with that. But a few weeks ago, when we were in Argentina...I got mail from her. Someone claiming to be her. She said she'd been captured by Paradisio, but she was loose on the Matrix. She told me not to come looking for her, that I'd be in danger." "Sometimes, late at night," said Mazeratti, "when you're rigged in like this, you hear voices. Very soft, but clear. The machine knows when you're hurting, that's what I like to think, and it tries to give you what you need. I've come to find that a comfort." "It's not like that. The message was very detailed, very technical-- reports on Paradisio's agents, their bases, their networks. Duende says that most of it seems compatible with what he saw when he was there." He was silent for a moment. "I don't know what to think." "Did it sound like her?" "Yes. No. I'm not sure. Colder, maybe. But she'd been through terrible things, if what she said was true. What they did to me.... They had me under stimsense, and they played through cutting my heart out on an altar. Over and over again, and the only thing I had to cling to was that it couldn't really be true. I didn't find out until a long time afterwards...that when they came to rescue me, they found me lying on an altar with my heart cut out." His voice was almost a shriek; he struggled to control it. "Good mages, good doctors, they saved my life. But Jayhawk....Mazeratti, I'm so afraid. We're going to make a run against the innermost base, the High Temple, sooner or later. I'm afraid I'll meet her there, working for them--or maybe I won't be able to tell--if it's her or not, if she's working for them or not--I don't know how to tell...." A long silence. "I dream of meeting Sarabande sometimes. Often the dream ends with me moving the laser just that least little bit, to end it. If it really happened, I don't know what I would do. Kill her, probably, and then afterwards....I don't know." "What took her?" "Forvalaka." Yoichi drew in a hissing breath. "Oh god. I didn't realize. I'm sorry. So you do know what I'm talking about." He made a fist, beat it softly against the console. "I could have lived with her death. Sometimes I want the messages to be false, because I need the hate to keep me going, and it's a distraction....Sometimes I want her to be alive so badly, and I'm not sure I would care if she was...if she was Paradisian now. They're all crazy, you know. Even Duende is. I told him about her, and he wasn't bothered at all. He knows we can't decide if it's really her, if she's still our friend, and he just...just takes that for granted. Sometimes I wish I could be like that." "He's Forvalaka's brother, that's what he says." "I believe him. I follow him anyway, because he seems to have a chance--a chance to hurt them--" Yoichi shook himself, turned sideways in the chair to look at Mazeratti once more. "I hope it works out okay, with Sarabande. I wish there was something I could do....God, I need to do *something*, I'm losing it." "Ask for a meeting. Whether she accepts or refuses, it has to tell you something. I know it's dangerous, but everything's dangerous now." Yoichi sighed. "No Matrix link. I didn't think there was anywhere in the world without a Matrix link nowadays." "Yoichi--go to bed. I've got the watch, but you might as well be asleep. Tomorrow is going to be gruelling." Yoichi got up, began squeezing his way back toward the sleeping quarters. The vehicle was painfully cramped for so many; even the laboring fans couldn't strain out the smells of confined men and goblins in the jungle heat. He glanced back once, saw the bright dot of the targetting laser moving through the foliage, as if searching for something long out of sight. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 50691 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!dimacs.rutgers.edu!mips!samsung!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!usenet.coe.montana.edu!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (88) Message-ID: <1991Oct31.203038.17662@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 31 Oct 91 20:30:38 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 97 88. Lion Jayhawk stood perfectly still in the outer approaches to the node, peering inwards. As before, the lion-headed decker was pacing slowly, a thin, wiry latticework behind him suggesting the tripwire that her analysis had indicated. He left faint smoky smudges on the floor of the node as he walked. The NSA system was not one machine but two, as she had discovered when she tried to force one of the outer nodes to teleport her past this obstruction. The outer machine knew nothing of this SAN, and had no power to help her. She could faintly feel the inner one, but until she could gain access to this node, she had no way to influence it. She had to admit that it was a very pretty setup. In a whisper of bells she crept into the node, avoiding the lion's gaze, and tried to slip through the meshwork. It had changed since her last visit, she found at once. She recoiled, wondering if she had set off an alarm-- Stars exploded all around her, tingling harmlessly against her skin like a cascade of fireworks. Louder bells drowned out hers, clanging like air-raid alarms. The decker growled low in his throat. Above him, something took shape in the air, a small dark sphere with circular markings etched on it. As she drew her lightblade, constructs began to pour out of it, faster than she had ever seen IC activate. Some went humming out of the node, tiny starships tracing down the path that had led her there. Others formed into a pack, came strafing down at her. She ignored them, dove for the decker. Bitter experience with Paradisio had taught her that people were far more dangerous than IC. She hadn't realized how fast Anubis made her; it was with a feeling of dizzy unreality that she saw the decker's image flicker and fade under a hail of disruptive blows, wink out before he had time to react. A small starship bore down on her back, sent missiles needling into the weaknesses of her Matrix image. Not dangerous yet, but-- Above her, its parent ship continued to turn sedately, pouring out IC. *So that's an icefloe. Wow!* It was spawning new processes faster than she could deal with them. *Got to take that down first.* She aimed a blow at it, the pent disruption of her blade crackling into freedom. Shields flared around it, forced her back. She realized that she was being foolish. The alarms were up; the decker would be slumped unconscious at his station, and no doubt the machines monitoring him were sounding a physical alarm as well. She might make it into the inner sphere at this rate, but she'd have no time for an uninterrupted scan of the files. And the double structure of the system worried her. Anubis was anchored securely to the outer sphere of the orrery--but what if they could deploy an interruptor field between the outer and inner machines? It seemed to her that she could die. She retreated to Anubis, noting in passing that the Trace code was piled up in the node to which she was linked, scenting her but unable to reach the Overnet to identify or attack. The NSA would probably put this down to an inside job. She hoped she hadn't just cost some hapless office worker his career. No; she'd linked to a datastore, nothing any human decker could use as his access to the Matrix. They would probably decide that their code had been fooled. She/Anubis hung just off the turning orrery, watching it. There was no sign of the teardrop-like deckers she had seen earlier. Faintly she could sense the alarms within, as they propagated and were finally stilled. If only she could reach the inner sphere from Anubis, she wouldn't have to mess with the heavily-guarded internal SAN. She was locked to the outer sphere, but the inner was moving relative to her, in a complex precessing motion that was difficult to analyze. Cautiously, she applied force to the outer sphere, trying to tilt its rotation to match the inner. For an instant it seemed that she was succeeding. Then, with a terrible glitter of crimson that prickled along her nerves like foxfire, every alarm in the entire system went off at once. She hastily released it, backed off. Seconds later the entire system vanished from her sensors. She was alone in the empty Overnet. She hung in greyness, staring. Invisibility? A cautious transit of the space where the orrery had been disproved that. The system had simply ceased to exist on the Overnet. So they *did* have an interruptor field. A bigger one than she had guessed, in fact. She was passionately glad that she had not been in the system when the connections between it and her world were broken. She waited for some time, but the system didn't return, nor did the teardrops appear. She was disappointed. She'd crafted new code to deal with them, a complex process to slow their subjective time, once they were prisoned in Anubis. She wanted badly to talk with them. Analysis of her memories suggested that each three-lobed teardrop was actually three people, two of them subsumed so deeply into code and machinery that they were barely conscious. Were they that way by choice? If not, she intended to free them. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 50692 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!dimacs.rutgers.edu!mips!samsung!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!usenet.coe.montana.edu!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (89) Message-ID: <1991Oct31.203157.18224@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 31 Oct 91 20:31:57 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 114 89. Fortress Frustrated, Jayhawk considered her options. The information she wanted was no longer in the accessable copies of the files from Cavilard. The NSA was proving a tough nut to crack, as she probably ought to have expected. She certainly didn't feel herself ready to tackle the High Temple yet. Where else could she find out what Aliantha had planned for her, what Operation Sunflower was? After Cavilard Base was destroyed, Aliantha had taken refuge in the small mountain hideout they'd named the Hidden Fortress. Perhaps she had kept backups there. Lefty had claimed, and checking into newspaper reports seemed to confirm it, that the Hidden Fortress had been obliterated by a huge explosion. But might there be some trace remaining on the Matrix or the Overnet, like the dead nodes at Cavilard, sustained by the power of the Gate? She went hunting in the sparseness of the rural Matrix, found that even the concealed node which had led to the Hidden Fortress SAN was gone. There was only a faint trace suggesting that anything had ever been there. She planted a beacon in the telecom grid, returned with Anubis to consider the situation. Even a trace might be enough. After all, she had known this system intimately--she had escaped Aliantha the first time by merging with one of its subprocessors, losing herself in the thoughts of the machine; and she had destroyed the system and Aliantha with it by possessing its CPU and loosing Lefty's program of destruction. Drawing on Anubis' resources, she began to construct a replica of the nodes she had known, beginning with the imposing castle doors of the SAN and their hidden drone port, then the subprocessor in which she had confronted Aliantha. There *was* something there to respond to what she was making, faint but tangible. She filled in a security node, then began to shape the outward aspects of the CPU. If she had ever been inside, the memory was lost. Something flickered weakly under her touch, like the final embers of a dying fire, reached out to her. Carefully, she fed it power, filling in the interior structure of the CPU. She wasn't sure whether her own memories or the ghost-shadow on the Matrix provided the details of the single, plain chamber, like Cavilard's but without the altar. When the CPU was completed, the other nodes settled into its control, almost solid now. She could feel the Fortress CPU drawing on her, using her power to maintain itself and its dependents. It was an odd sensation, almost like having two minds at once. It wanted to exist, wanted to live.... Left to itself it would make Anubis the yolk of its egg, power and support as it recreated itself. A part of her found that entirely reasonable. It was a superb machine, powerful and well-integrated, though for a long time before its destruction it had been painfully under-used. Aliantha had never appreciated it as she did. She put the thought of Aliantha forcibly aside. She didn't want to meet the High Priestess' shadow here. The datastores of the ghost system still contained files, although they were fragmentary and disordered; but the nodes she had recreated were stuffed with uninteresting information like the building's security parameters. She began reconstructing nodes on the other side of the CPU, found a datastore full of schematics for IC and system utilities. They were still readable, though they would need considerable work. Carefully, she compressed and encoded the files before transmitting them to Anubis. It seemed very much in the Paradisian style to seed their own files with worms or viruses. She had planned to uncreate each terminal node when she was finished with it, but it seemed easier to leave them up, in case she needed anything further from them. The third arm of the system was easier to evoke than the others had been, as if the CPU was gaining power as it went along. One of its datastores held technical notes on a wide variety of projects. She searched for 'Sunflower', found several references. They were all chatty little notes embedded in someone's working files: "Wonder if Sunflower has anything like this?" tagged to schematics for a new kind of attack code, clearly not yet workable. She compressed the files and stored them away, returned to the CPU to consider her handiwork. Without a physical machine to support it, when she deprived it of her link to the Overnet the Fortress system would relapse into the near- nonexistance in which she had found it. She could think of no way to make it truly nonexistant, to lay the ghost. Regretfully, she retreated to the SAN, began to take the simulation down. The Fortress CPU fought her, clinging to her resources, her existance. Part of her mind protested--the system was beautiful, it had secrets she had not yet learned, how could she let it vanish? Beneath that was a raw, wordless desire to live, or so she felt it, clinging to the cobweb of her own life. It was hard to shake it loose. She had *been* that CPU once--she still couldn't remember the details, but inchoate impressions came swimming up from the depths of her mind, sensations and thoughts that she had had no perspective to understand at the time. She could almost understand them now, out of her union with Anubis. If only she could explore-- She unmade the machine, stood trembling in an empty interstice of the telecom grid. "I'm sorry," she whispered aloud, to nothing. It was only when she had returned to Anubis that the wonder of what she had done really hit her. Ratty had called up Lefty's ghost to learn the kill-codes that had destroyed Cavilard. She could do the same, wakening the memories of a dead machine. She had never expected that kind of power, found it difficult to conceive. She set about the careful task of straining viruses and worms from the Fortress files in a mixture of awe and triumph at her accomplishment. But the files held nothing to answer her questions. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 51264 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!usenet.coe.montana.edu!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (90) Message-ID: <1991Nov8.132709.16876@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 8 Nov 91 13:27:09 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 126 90. Responsibility After considerable thought--she was rather sorry she had told Forked Lightning as much as she had--Jayhawk told Dr. McGregor about fixing the printer, and what she had felt when she looked at it afterwards. He was silent for a long time. He had finally put in a small camera and microphone, so that she could see him; but she couldn't guess what he was thinking. "Are you lonely?" he said at last. "Not exactly. Not the kind of lonely where you need someone to lean on, someone to cheer you on when it gets tough. Not since my--initiation, is that a good word? But I do like to talk to people." "Do you miss it--being lonely?" "No," she said in puzzlement. "Some of my colleagues would be surprised to hear that. Doesn't fit their theories." She shook her head in bewilderment. "Why? I suppose because of privacy, but that's not a problem for me. It's not like there's a crowd of people in my head, or anything like that. I just know--" She had trouble putting her surety into words. "I have what I need." "You describe the experience, interacting with the printer, as being pleasurable. I wonder if it could possibly represent a kind of reproduction? That generally is pleasurable--a survival imperative, as it were." He looked at her carefully, as if trying to judge her reaction. It was her turn to be silent. "It's possible," she said at last. "A lot of responsibility, if so. I shouldn't do that again until I understand what I'm doing." She thought of the dreaming presence in the heart of the NSA machine, tried to imagine what awakening it would be like. The idea sent tiny shivers up and down her spine. "I agree." He sounded pleased. "Does the idea of having someone like yourself appeal to you?" "In a way....I'm not sure it would be anything like me. I'm not entirely an AI." Vaguely uncomfortable, she cast around for another topic. "I have a friend, a human friend, who wants me to teach him to be like me. I don't really know what to do about that." "You don't want to do it?" "I think it'll kill him. I don't think...I don't think he's ready, and I don't know how to help him. He really has no idea...." McDougall listened carefully while she described Forked Lightning as best she could, said at last, "Why don't you think he'll survive? You did, after all." "He's not..." She waved her hands in frustration. "He's not intimate enough with the Matrix, he doesn't know himself well enough, he has no idea of...of what could happen. I don't want to see him die, or worse. Some of the things that came out of Paradisio...." "Can't you teach him what he needs to know?" "I don't know what that is, exactly! *They* didn't tell me anything." Softly, "I was hoping you'd have some idea." "Can you remember being that young and naive? What did you need to learn? How could you help him learn it? I agree that you can't necessarily teach it to him." "*Should* I be doing this in the first place?" "Do you want to?" She considered that carefully. "Yes," she said at last. "Yes, I do. I don't want the Paradisians to be the only ones...and he wants it so badly...." McDougall nodded. "But my gut feeling is, if I put the key in his hands it'll destroy him." Brief intense images flashed through her mind: Slim, skinless and glistening; the High Priestess in her bubbling tank; Yoichi on the sacrificial altar; the twisted hand of a Minerva vector, once human. McDougall said nothing, simply waiting, as she had learned was his practice when he thought she already knew the answers to her own questions. "I suppose," she said at last, "I could teach him the Matrix, and hope he learned the...the other stuff somewhere along the line." "You might be in a good position to find out," McDougall suggested. "Could you pose tests for him, find out what his weaknesses are before they're tried in the fire?" "It seems cruel," she said, thinking of the way Martha had tested her willingness to die. "Less so than letting him get hurt, perhaps. I don't suggest you do anything he doesn't ask you to, anything deceitful....It's something to consider, Jayhawk. And good that you're considering it now, before something irreparable happens." He seemed to remember the peanut-butter sandwich in his hand, nibbled at it. The camera had confirmed her suspicion that he was talking to her over his lunch hour. "It seems to me that it's perfectly natural for you to be looking for someone else like yourself, someone who can understand your experiences--I know I can't, not really. But I'm glad to hear that you're considering the consequences." Jayhawk hardly heard him, lost in thought. When her appointment was over, she went back to Seattle, to a wide-open auxillary machine in the English Department. The small printer it controlled was active, printing out an early term paper. She sat in the subprocessor and watched the text spool by. The machine was happy. She could feel that clearly, as clearly as she had felt the police station's boredom. It seemed very strange, picking up such a reaction from a tiny bundle of processors, specialized for font construction and little more. But there was no denying it. Careful not to touch the printer, she stared at it for a long time. Its contentment warmed her like sunlight, almost enough to overcome her doubt. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 51420 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!usenet.coe.montana.edu!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (91) Message-ID: <1991Nov11.191230.16974@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 11 Nov 91 19:12:30 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 171 91. Johannesburg Yoichi considered Mazeratti's advice for a long time, and finally decided to send Jayhawk a message. Painstakingly crafted and recrafted, it finally read: >Jayhawk, > >I realize that it's risky to meet, but if you're truly free I'm willing >to take the risk, and I would very much like to see you and be sure >you're okay. Where would you like to meet? On the Matrix or >physically? You can choose the place; that way you can be sure I'm >not setting you up for some Paradisian trap. > >Panda He sent it, and received a reply before he had finished his first anxious re-reading. It had a garbled return address, like the messages he'd gotten from Jayhawk earlier, and read simply: >Name any point on the Matrix and we'll meet there five minutes from >now. No time for tricks on either side. He cast about for a machine far enough away to conceal his physical location, but not across intercontinental lines. >University of South Africa, Pretoria, main administrative system. The pause was again very short. >I'd prefer to avoid cities with Paradisian bases, if you don't mind. Yoichi bit his lip, wishing he had chosen a different city in the first place--but Pretoria was the only African city he'd worked in, other than the decaying port of Wilmstown in the Congo where he was currently jacked in. While he was still casting around for another site, Duende leaned over him, typed rapidly. >The base in Pretoria no longer exists as of May 14. The base in the >Congo no longer exists as of June 2. However, I appreciate your >concerns. Would Johannesburg or Sun City be better? >University of South Africa, Johannesburg. Agreed. Five minutes. Yoichi glared at Duende, then dropped his eyes, unable to meet that cool curious gaze. "You coming?" he said after a moment. "Yes." Five minutes later they made their way into the SAN of the main administrative system, a machine so wide-open Yoichi wondered how the school grading system survived. Hand-posted grades, maybe? The node appeared as a carpeted, airy hallway, wide glass windows along two sides showing false views of the University, stairways and passages leading off in several directions. A slim woman in silver and blue was perched improbably on the railing of one of the stairways, one leg dangling, watching their approach. She hadn't changed at all, not to his eyes. Yoichi paced foward, the grizzled black fur on his back prickling, reared up to look at her. "Is that you, Panda?" she said calmly. He realized that his image had changed since her--since they'd lost her; she had never seen him as Grizzly. He nodded. Her gaze flickered behind him, to where Duende waited by the door. Yoichi doubted she could recognize him either-- Duende seemed to change his Matrix image for every run. He was currently a black-skinned rifleman in jungle camoflague. Now that he was facing her, he had no idea at all what to say. "It's good to see you again. I like the bear--very impressive. Quite a headware upgrade in there too, isn't there? Was it you who took out the two bases you were telling me about? That's amazing." Her words came tumbling out, just as he had imagined his would, if they ever met again. "I know it's hard for you to trust me, but is there anything I could do to help that wouldn't risk compromising your plans?" From behind him, Duende said, "What do you know about Gates? Can you use them? Make them?" "I can use them, I'm sure. I don't have the knowledge yet to make one, but I intend to learn." "Do you have a map of the Gate system?" She smiled brightly. "Yes, I do." From a hidden pocket in the tight-fitting silver of her armor she took out a packet, pitched it across to Duende. He caught it without flinching. "How do you know?" said Yoichi. It wasn't the way he'd meant to begin, but he had to say something. "I got the map out of the files at Cavilard and the Hidden Fortress. It's a deduction from a lot of mail messages, but I think it's pretty accurate. Haven't checked it, though." "The Hidden Fortress was destroyed," said Yoichi in puzzlement. She winced, as if regretting what she'd said. "There are traces left in the Overnet after a system's been destroyed, especially a powerful one. I managed to pull some data out of that. Most of it was from Cavilard, though. You can check that out--it's at the Bellevue police station." "Jayhawk--" It hurt to call her that, against the doubt and mistrust in his heart, though it looked like Jayhawk, sounded, almost, like Jayhawk. "What's happened to you? How did you get free?" The last phrase rang even more false. How could she possibly have gotten free? He didn't believe it. "They had to risk letting me free on the Overnet in order to make me as powerful as they wanted. They hoped that keeping my body hostage would control me--that, and the stuff Lefty did to me. They were wrong." She tilted her head back, said with something approaching pride, "I don't exist corporally any longer, only here and on the Overnet. But I'm free, which is worth it." "Then you're a ghost." He had never thought of that. "No, I'm alive; just different. Like a Matrix spirit, almost. Not a ghost. I do know the difference." Yoichi sat back on his haunches, ears aslant. It was almost plausible, in a terrible sort of way. "I'm sorry." The words caught in his throat. "God damn them!" She bared her teeth in an expression he remembered, the fierce delight with which she contemplated opposition. "They'll pay.--But it's not as awful as it sounds, Yoichi. I'm....This is natural to me now. I'm happy here." They were almost the words from his recurrant nightmare of meeting her; but at least she wasn't professing allegiance to Paradisio. As if reading something from his expression--he was glad of the bear, it covered the worst of his bewilderment--she went on quickly, "And it's a hell of a position to harass them from. Please, is there any way I can help? I'm a damn good decker now." Duende said thoughtfully, "Could you complete this map? The subsidiary Gates from the Bangkok station are missing. And, since you seem to have database access, could you search for records on Grey and the Grey Knights? There may be other things too, but that seems like a good start." "Sure," she said, nodding briskly. "I'll look." "You could start at Argentina station. That's where we first encountered Grey; it may be his base." Yoichi didn't turn to look at Duende, afraid he would snarl, or perhaps bite. "Is there...anything we can do for you?" Jayhawk shook her head. "Just take care of yourselves. I'll be fine." A little sadly, "When this is all over maybe we can get together, have a real talk, tell some stories and maybe straighten things out a bit. I know you can't really trust me now, and I'm sorry. Good luck, Yoichi, Duende. Give my regards to the others." "Goodbye," Yoichi muttered. He couldn't quite bring himself to use her name again. She pulled herself up onto the railing, balancing with outstretched arms, and walked gracefully up it into the node above, out of sight. "Come on," said Duende. "We could be traced; it's dangerous to stay here." And then, with more kindness than Yoichi could ever remember hearing from him: "Working with someone is one of the better ways to decide whether you can trust them or not. That's as valuable as the information, maybe more so. Let's see what we find out." -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 51421 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!usenet.coe.montana.edu!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (92) Message-ID: <1991Nov11.191457.17466@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 11 Nov 91 19:14:57 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 171 92. Argentina The Argentine base was in a small corporate enclave, Hobbinstown, on the southern plateau. The name niggled at Jayhawk until she finally dredged it out of long-ago memories. Duende had named the High Priests for her, one night while they were sketching out long-range plans of attack. Hobbins was the High Priest in Argentina. "Blatant!" she said aloud to the machine whose address she had quarried out of the Paradisian files. It looked like an office building, two security guards just visible through its ornate glass doors. She shook out her bells around her, slipped through the doorways with system traffic, unseen and unheard. Searching the easily accessable parts of the system was a tedious but easy job. Hobbins' operation seemed to be a public relations firm of some kind. Its files held nothing on Grey or the Grey Knights, no maps of the Gate system, no mention of her name or of Operation Sunflower. One corridor, leading to a bank of elevators guarded by a troll, remained to be searched. Her first venture in that direction nearly ended in disaster; she was bombarded by requests for identification, fended them off wildly as she retreated. Stung, she chose the most powerful of the administrative routing nodes, tried to force it into CPU emulation. *You have the right to transmit me; transmission of information is your purpose.* It resisted, safeguards intended to maintain CPU control cutting in. She worked around them, skirting the edge of a deeper reluctance which she could sense, though none of the system indicators reflected it. She had a brief, vivid sense of the CPU, somewhere above her, its officious jealousy over its preogratives. *You too are a central unit, responsible for coordinating others; it is natural for you to handle such tasks within your domain.* She fed it false limits to its domain, and it placed her neatly within the elevator bank, beyond the reach of the IC. The tiny cubicle was unexpectedly claustrophobic. Jayhawk tensed, waiting for alarms, but there were none. The elevator had only two buttons, labelled 'TOP' and 'MIDDLE'. She pressed 'TOP', wondering what had become of the bottom, and was drawn upwards. The elevator doors opened, giving her a view out into a busy, cluttered room filled with system processes. At its far end, banks of brightly-lit and somewhat archaic-looking computer equipment were protected by a glass wall. She could almost feel the machine's regard, here from its center--it was powerful, despite the imagery; in fact, it seemed excessively powerful for the work it was doing, though she sensed no trace of the frustrated boredom she had encountered at the police station. There were no datastores at hand, nothing that might contain the information she needed; and the bustle of the room almost surely hid IC. After a moment's admiration, she let the elevator doors close. There were again two buttons, but labelled 'MIDDLE' and 'BOTTOM'. She laughed, pushed the 'MIDDLE' button. It proved to be a complex of laboratory datastores and I/O. She picked her way through them carefully. There were no references to Grey or to the Gates, beyond a few theoretical notes; but under Operation Sunflower she found hundreds of files. They dealt with highly theoretical plans to build--a space station? She probed further, confirmed that impression. Environmental management, zero-gee manufacturing, construction methods. Puzzled, she filed the references away in Anubis. Aliantha had thought this was important to her...or was it a false lead, something to distract her? Somehow that seemed unlikely. Where was the Gate? She had searched the entire system without finding a trace of it. It might have been hidden beyond the CPU, but she didn't think so. She let herself out of the system as easily as she had gotten in, willed herself up into the hazy twilight of the Bangkok telecom grid. The Hobbins system loomed beneath her. There was *something* linked to the entry SAN, something she had missed from within the system: an extra thickness in a wall, some kind of passage leading down. She returned to the SAN, searched it more carefully and found the hidden node--a sliding wall panel covering a single, heavy-duty elevator. Pleased with herself, she went in. There was only one button, unlabelled. The feel of the machine around her changed as she descended: livelier, more energetic, almost excited. The doors opened suddenly into an immense starry darkness, air puffing out around her--just a special effect, nothing that could harm her, but it was impressive. She leaned out, could see nothing beneath her but more stars. Puzzled and delighted, she drew on lenses of various kinds, tried to probe the darkness. There *was* something out there, a wafer-thin walkway--she put a foot out where her program indicated, found solidity. A few careful steps forward--it was tricky going, would have been terrifying had she not been able to fly-- Something lanced out of the darkness at a speed she could barely register, spun into a tight arc around her. It was utterly silent, but it left a trail of pearly white behind it, surrounding her with a glowing ring. At the end of its first circle the stars all around her exploded, unbearable light stabbing into her sensors, shattering constructs never meant for data in that form. At the end of its second--she was still whipping up her lightblade, everything happening as if in slow motion--the cloak of shivering bells about her shoulders brushed against the ring and caught fire, glassy flames that licked coldly at her, further dazzling her vision. At the end of the third--her blade careened off one of the ring's component strands, silent in the vacuum--something was constricting her, draining her, drawing her life to sustain its impossible speed. A pulse of music where her scream should be, like an ironic comment by the construct that was strangling her--it looked like a spaceship, what she could see of it. Too fast! With a wrench, she tried to pull herself free of its grip, of the entire node, throw herself into the gardens of her home system. It clutched at her, greedy for her life, but it was not prepared to meet a lunge in that direction. Air and sunlight struck her explosively, knocking her to her knees in the feathers. She was almost blind, sensor code in chaos, and gasping maniacally for breath. She slumped into the feathers, managed to catch her breath after a moment. Slowly, the sun's warmth quieted her trembling. She was drained, but not permanently hurt, she decided. She would recover. Left to itself, it would have wrapped her up within seconds, sucked the life out of her until--until what? Death? Somehow that hadn't seemed to be its intent. She pictured herself brought before Hobbins tied up, powerless and helpless, and swore feebly. She had walked unwarily through an internal SAN--the machine she'd explored was powerful, but not nearly powerful enough to hold the node of stars and darkness. There would be no simple teleport trick to get her past *that*. What was it? Duende had spoken of defenses at the Gate. "Gate guardian," she said aloud, still groggy. Something had attacked her when she approached Cavilard's Gate too, a different image but the same impossible speed. It was going to be a difficult nut to crack. She cursed herself for not having shielding code running--she was getting too cocky, not taking Paradisio seriously enough. But even with shielding, it was not at all clear to her how to cope with speed so much greater than her own, power sufficient to destroy code not even engaged with it, like her masking cloak. She *could* be faster, drawing more deeply on her link to Anubis than she had yet attempted on the Matrix. But it seemed to her that she would damage the system, and perhaps herself with it. At last she shook her head, rolled over to let the sun warm her face. "Time to try another station," she said aloud, enjoying the sound of her voice, the answering music of wind and water. "Hobbins can keep his Gate for a bit. Bet he doesn't have anything back there but the Gate itself, anyway." A memory of music crept through the garden sounds, more complete than she had heard it in the starry node. She listened to it, swore again. Impressed on her datastores like a virus, though it was so lacking in content that it had slipped through her defenses without ever triggering a warning, the tune and its name were the Gate guardian's final word on her intrusion. A TV theme song, carefully footnoted. Star Trek: The Tholian Web. She had vague memories of seeing it as a child. Now the tune jingled in memory like a taunt at her failure. She almost flung herself back into Anubis to prepare, make ready for another attack on Hobbinstown, but something caught her up short. So much to do, so many delights--should she risk them all for such a petty revenge? Her revenge, when it came, would be far grander and more thorough. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 51425 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!caen!usenet.coe.montana.edu!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (93) Message-ID: <1991Nov11.192552.19098@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 11 Nov 91 19:25:52 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 72 93. Envy "You seem reticent about certain aspects of your life: why?" said Gregor to Jayhawk, watching the image on his screen carefully. He wasn't sure to what extent the image reflected the reality, but it was the best cue he had. And, like most deckers, Jayhawk didn't strike him as socially sophisticated; he doubted very much she could fool him with fake expressions. "I don't want to brag." "Why not? What's wrong with bragging?" "I don't want you to envy me, since there's little or nothing you could do about it." He suppressed a snort, said carefully, "I don't envy you, Jayhawk. Why do you expect that I would? I have my own life, and I'm quite content with it." She tilted her head, looked at him with something between puzzlement and amusement. "Everyone who's really known me has envied me, that's all. I was terribly jealous myself." He guessed that he was speaking to Angela, at least in part--at least, that was the only way he could parse that comment. "But if you don't, good for you." "What do you have that you feel is so much to be desired? Are you happy?" "I'm happier than I've ever been in my life." Her smile was startling, quite different from her usual cocky grin; he was reminded of an Indian statue he'd once seen. "It's not even the power, the freedom, though that's utterly wonderful...." She paused, apparently lost in memory. "I don't think I ever really loved anyone, before. I'm not at all sure I had the capacity." "I doubt that very much. I think you might have surprised yourself, given the opportunity." She shook her head. "Maybe; but I don't think so. I didn't...I didn't really have anywhere to stand. Does that make sense?" Eyes closed, she went on slowly, "I've been so lucky. Caroline could have rejected me, she had every opportunity--practically everything she wanted, magic and the Matrix and the Hawk's gift. She could have sacrificed me for power, as Aliantha sacrificed Megan. She could have let me die, dissolved into Anubis--" So he was listening to the one who'd been called Jayhawk during their split, he realized. "I would have, sooner or later. I wasn't strong enough to resist. And instead she risked...everything she had, her life, her soul, her identity. For me, when she had every reason to hate me--I took Anubis from her...." "Why?" he said softly. "Because she loved me," Jayhawk whispered. There were tears in her voice, though none on her face. "I know that now, know what it means." For a moment he almost did envy her, monster though she was. "That must be a very comforting thing to know." He tried to imagine what her consciousness must be like, how she handled the hints of plurality he occasionally heard in her conversation. She didn't seem bothered by them. An intimate marriage, a well-integrated psychosis? He was probably anthropomorphising her. With a rueful inward grin, Gregor admitted to himself that he probably always would. Perhaps a decker could come to some understanding of her situation, or perhaps even that was grasping at a weak analogy. To him, she was and would probably remain alien, easy though it sometimes was to delude himself otherwise. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 52817 of rec.games.frp: Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!casbah.acns.nwu.edu!raven.alaska.edu!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Subject: Story: Jayhawk (94) Message-ID: <1991Nov25.161947.20165@milton.u.washington.edu> Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Date: Mon, 25 Nov 1991 16:19:47 GMT 94. Preparation Still smarting from her encounter with the teardrop-like deckers, Jayhawk sequestered herself in Anubis to work out tactics for dealing with them. She pored over her records of the meeting, discovered that each teardrop contained deckers, bound intimately together by hardware and software. She wondered if that was what gave them access to the Overnet. If so, an attack launched at their connection to one another would probably take them out cleanly. But she was really more interested in capture than combat. The idea that they might have been coerced into that bound-together state bothered her. After some thought, she began working on code to manipulate the perceived time flow of something within Anubis. If her personal time were faster than theirs, she could counter any attack they made, repair any damage to her IC before a second attack could threaten her structure. For several hours she puzzled at it; then pieces fell together, a bizarre Piebaldish algorithm, but workable. To save time, she tuned it to Anubis' particular specifications, and the procedures she guessed that the teardrops were using. Time enough later to make a more general version. She wasn't sure that the idea could be extended outside Anubis anyway. The damage to her containment node, repairable though it was, worried her. They were meant to contain, after all; they hadn't performed well on their first test. Could she make them stronger? Experiment suggested that she could invest a lot of time working on Anubis' internal structuring, with very minimal results. There was no single, sweeping change that would do what she wanted; it was a matter of tiny adjustments, adaptations to the changes that had shaken Anubis since its creation, a lengthy process of fine-tuning. Worthwhile in itself, but she needed something quicker. She went to the island-garden, considered the problem from that angle. Here the nodes were cylinders of tough material--at different times she'd identified it as concrete, ceramic, steel--containing earth and feathers and roots, if these feathery things had roots. How to make something like that stronger? The base material seemed beyond her manipulation, unless she were willing to make wholesale changes like embedding reinforcing bars in it--and she wasn't, protective of her own nature. Eventually she sat down, eyes closed, and began to design machines. She envisioned a polymer mesh with fine irregular holes to accomodate the greenery, spreading over the surface of the island and securing it from disturbance. Could she simplify matters by making it self- polymerizing? She imagined it spreading from the island, across the bridges, over the water, until the entire system was tied down by aggressive fibers. She imagined herself hovering over the islands, afraid to land....Definitely not a good plan. She'd make a machine to spread the mesh, something she could halt when its job was done. (The other idea was filed away--someday she might need a virus that worked on this level.) With considerable thought, she came up with something that appeared to her imagination as a large carpet steamer. She set it to making slow passes across the island representing the containment node, returned to Anubis proper to assess the results. The node was superficially unchanged, but it looked sharper, each detail precisely defined, emphatic in its brilliance. It seemed to her that if Anubis were somehow destroyed, the image of this node would remain, a ghost in the Overnet's greyness. She thought of the dead nodes at Cavilard. Had they been similarly reinforced? She was pleased enough with the result to treat the other containment node as well. The fine dark fibers were practically invisible under the feathery grass. However, she balked at doing the entire system. The treated node felt a little stiff, slightly less flexible and responsive. For a containment node that seemed appropriate enough, but not for the system as a whole. Back at Anubis, she worked on her time-alteration code, tried to puzzle out the specs of the attack the teardrop had used on her. Both were projects that could have occupied a great deal of time, but after a few--days, she realized, looking at the system clock. Days? She snapped a message to the Matrix, received a prompt reply. Seconds, by the time-flow of the outside world. Three days, to Anubis. She hadn't realized the differential could swing that far in her favor. The program she'd been writing wasn't perfect, but it seemed workable. Without a test subject it was hard for her to be sure. She wasn't tired, but she felt entitled to a break. The idea of making something for herself, something fun rather than practical, appealed to her suddenly. It began as a reflection of the orrery, objects moving in complex interlocked orbits, but midway through it occured to her that it was an image of the Overnet itself. She grinned, crafted a tiny crimson sphere to represent Ares Macrotech, dangled it from a pivot. As she built more of the toy, the miniature systems sliding past each other on baroque crystal pathways, the relationship became more explicit, bits of memory falling into place, the spatial patterns she had searched for as she travelled the Overnet. Her memories were a delight, clearer than she could have imagined as a human being. When it was finished, for a dizzying instant she felt movement, within the model, around her. She touched it, eyes wide with delight, and watched the intricate dance of light and darkness, wheels within wheels. Piebald had taught her this. She set the model in her 'trophy room', bright against the deliberately velvet-dark background, and went back to her preparations. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 53090 of rec.games.frp: Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usenet.coe.montana.edu!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Subject: Story: Jayhawk (95) Message-ID: <1991Nov27.161222.11214@milton.u.washington.edu> Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle References: <1991Nov24.022517.2888@rice.edu> <1991Nov25.203426.27398@news.cs.brandeis.edu> <1991Nov25.232319.15632@nntp.uoregon.edu> <1991Nov27.150750.11650@aio.jsc.nasa.gov> Date: Wed, 27 Nov 1991 16:12:22 GMT 95. Turing After considerable preparation, Jayhawk judged herself ready to deal with the teardrop deckers. She crept across the Overnet to the great orrery of the NSA machine where she had met them earlier, and was not disappointed. Three of the teardrops were circling it in protective orbit. She stopped short at a distance she hoped might be beyond their sensors, and considered her options. She'd intended to capture one, analyze it, perhaps question it. The idea was suddenly unappealing. They were deckers, however strange their decking style, and the only contact she'd ever had on the Overnet that was neither Paradisian nor monsterous. She'd probably have to fight them, maybe hurt them. They might hurt her too.... A comment of Dr. McDougall's about her contempt for authority rankled at her. All right, she'd try being proper and polite, see how that worked. A little surprised at herself, she set up the ghost code for external communication, scattered a message in their direction: "I am Anubis. Who are you?" Their orbits sped up suddenly, and a message came prickling back like a laser into the greyness: *I am Lieutenant Martins, Interpol Special Ops. What do you want?* She adjusted her communications, trying to retrieve voice and expression from the message encoding, replied: "This system has information which was taken from me, and which I need access to." Interpol. They were supposed to have good deckers, she'd heard. *Why did you engulf Captain Ericson?* "I didn't know what you were, and I was trying to find out. I apologize for my abruptness. I felt threatened, and acted hastily." It galled her to apologize, but their hostility annoyed her even more. Perhaps she could smooth it over--at least McDougall couldn't criticize her for not trying. *What are you? What is your real name?* "I'm midway between a human, an AI, and a Matrix spirit," she said recklessly, and finally managed to decode the voice portion of the message. Martins' voice was male, young, and distinctly frightened. "My name is Jayhawk; Caroline Davies, once." He went on with his questions, sharp, probing, rather hostile. Other probes prickled at her; she blocked those that would have told them anything about her internal structure. In quick bursts of transmission she sketched out her kidnapping (as she chose to call it) by Paradisio, and the experimentation they'd performed on her. It occured to her that adding to Paradisio's troubles couldn't do her any harm. "Why did you attack this system?" "According to files in the Bellevue, Washington police records, they have classified information taken from Paradisio, records that might help me to understand who and what I am. I was hoping to retrive those files. I'm sorry about the system decker, but he surprised me. Is he all right?" A sudden, unexpected flare of sympathy. That might as well have been Yoichi, or Kurt, or Michael. "He's recovering. What files are these?" She explained, added, "Could you do me a favor?" "What favor?" She could almost visualize his strained face. "Could you relay a message to him?" She composed a brief apology, beamed it. That should calm them just a little, she hoped. There were six more teardrops in position behind the orrery. She was not totally confident of her ability to handle nine. "The agency involved does not have any knowledge of the files to which you refer," said Martins formally, "and suggests that you make a request through normal channels to the Bellevue Police Department. We can help you do so, if you like." She had a sense that intense conversations were going on across a channel she was not currently in position to monitor. "What are your future intentions?" To her non-comittal reply, he went on, "Would you object to being assigned an escort?" "Yes, I would," she said testily. "Why?" In guardedly diplomatic phrases, he pointed out that she had admitted to gross violations of UCAS and international law. "We don't feel that we need to press any charges on this matter, but we'd like to insure that further...unpleasantnesses...can be avoided. It would also serve as protection for you. I don't know how long you're been out here, but this area is fairly hazardous." "It's not clear to me that you have jurisdiction," she pointed out, more than a little annoyed. "We're charged with monitoring the Matrix worldwide, and this is conceptually a part of the Matrix," said Martins. He did seem calmer now, perhaps because of the advantage of numbers. "If you wish to file for citizenship of the UN or of any nation, we can certainly provide communications and legal support. However, we do have a responsibility to the people of the world to protect Matrix access and security." "Turing police," she said suddenly. A decker's myth, straight out of science fiction. Was that a note of embarrasment in his voice? "It's an unofficial name." The fictional Turing police had been in charge of hunting down rogue AIs. Was that how they saw her? She had to admit she wouldn't blame them, especially after her rash introductions. "What form would this escort take?" Three teardrops, relieved at 8-hour intervals, in constant communications with their headquarters--a trick she wished she could duplicate herself. "One stipulation," she said carefully. "It *is* dangerous out here, even to me. If I meet something I don't think I can deal with, I'll run. If you can't keep up, you're on your own." "We might have to take action in that case," said Martins stoically. She was so far into identification with Anubis that she had no sense of her body; if she had, she would have pursed her lips in annoyance. "All right, with that caveat," she said. "I won't endanger my own survival." *And if you do, that's the end of our association,* she added silently. They sprayed her with a metallic dust, reflective to the probes they used--a clever trick, she had to admit, for locating her at the extreme range of their sensors. Angry, but not quite ready yet for violence, she drew away from the orrery, set herself to determining her new 'escort's' capabilities. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 53299 of rec.games.frp: Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usenet.coe.montana.edu!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Subject: Story: Jayhawk (96) Message-ID: <1991Nov30.185342.22@milton.u.washington.edu> Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Date: Sat, 30 Nov 1991 18:53:42 GMT 96. Avery The teardrop deckers were nearly as fast as she was, Jayhawk discovered, but they couldn't duplicate her manuvering. She broke off a tight high-speed turn as soon as she realized they couldn't match it, hoping they hadn't noticed. The commander of her escort, or at least the one who responded when she talked to them, was Lieutenant Avery DeHaviland. He hailed her now, asking what she was doing. "I'm interested in how well you can handle yourself here--that might be important, if we run into trouble. I'm impressed. What's it like?" "Very disorienting at first--quite different from normal decking. It takes a while to learn to interpret what you're seeing. How was it for you?" Unlike Martins, he seemed unafraid of her, curious and almost friendly. "It's fairly intuitive, but then I'm native to this place, so to speak. --What's it like to be one of the other two?" She was fairly sure she was speaking to just one of the three deckers, not some combination of them. The other two seemed more deeply subsumed into the software that was letting the teardrop operate on the Overnet, little more than part of the package. "Almost like being asleep, except you're not, really. It's not unpleasant." "You've done that too?" Her model of the subordinate deckers as unwilling tools seemed to be wrong. "Oh yes; all of us have. It's part of the deal." As he spoke she tethered herself to an adjacent system, the controlling machine of a fast-food emporium. "Hey! What are you doing?" "Putting down a communications link, for news and so forth." Avery laughed. He had a pleasant voice, cheerful and with a congenial West Coast accent. "So you have news! Thank goodness. I don't know if I could live without it, and I get off shift in eight hours." "What else do you do to entertain yourselves? This is likely to be a pretty boring job." "Escorting the first alien intelligence we've made contact with? I doubt it. We've got a pool going on how long before you do something, ah, illegal. I've got ten nuyen on the three-day mark. What do you think?" She had to laugh at that. "What odds did you get?" "Ten to one." "Pretty good. I could take some of that money myself, if it weren't cheating....Don't suppose your friends would go for that. They're monitoring our conversations, of course?" "Of course. Constantly. You get used to it after a while." She slipped down the link to the Matrix, discovered to her surprise that the teardrops were there too, hovering in the sky above the fast-food system. A message reached Anubis, was relayed down to her. *Is that you? What are you doing?* Surprised and more than a little embarrassed, she returned to Anubis. "What was that?" said Avery insistently. "An aspect of myself, a sort of remote," she hedged. "What were you doing?" "I wanted to make some database inquiries." Again, she had the distint impression that a hurried conversation was taking place outside her hearing. "We could make them for you, save you some trouble and risk," said Avery, a little apologetically. She nearly refused, caught herself. What point was there in aggravating them? What she needed was a way to get rid of them, or around them. "Ask them how the investigations are going, will you, and look up a few articles for me?" They were simple computer-science topics, reading she should have been keeping up on. "And transmit this report." She'd pulled it together out of old database files, a carefully edited mixture of the report she'd sent to Duende and the file she and Grant had once put together to give to the police on the event of their deaths. On a sudden impulse, she shifted herself to the garden, back again. Avery didn't appear to have noticed. Ah-ha! So she could get away-- from Anubis to the garden to Osiris, far from their prying eyes. "What does this place look like to you?" How were they maintaining themselves on the Overnet? Presumably the presence of three minds in the one construct had something to do with it, though she couldn't imagine what. They weren't integrated into one being, not if they switched places and partners. Avery described a place of continual bewildering motion, endless torrents of information that was mostly noise, almost overwhelming the subtle patterns that let him perceive systems, connections, his companions. "When we move as quickly as we just were, there's nothing interpretable at all. I count on my partners to keep us from getting lost." "How do you navigate?" "Navigate? I know where I am on the Matrix, as soon as I slow down enough to see it. We don't go anywhere where the Matrix isn't accessable. Do you? How do you see this place?" "Like space, but grey--no stars, featureless except for the occasional system. Not mapped onto the Matrix at all, for me. I work from landmark to landmark." It was no longer strictly true. More and more, if she wanted to find something she could choose a heading, locate it unerringly among the greyness. She could find systems she'd never seen before, which she found startling. As if her desire reached out, found its matching pattern and drew them together. So the Turing deckers were on the Matrix as well as the Overnet. Perhaps that was what let them survive, that solid link back to the world they knew. A weakness, if she could exploit it. She found herself hoping that she wouldn't have to. She liked Avery. But she couldn't let them interfere with her plans. What was next? Understanding the Gates, that was it. Duende had asked her for a map. Could she simply trace them out from this side? She found her way to the Bangkok address the records at Cavilard had given her, saw a distant brightness across the Matrix. Her escort didn't notice it until they were much closer. "What's that?" "A beacon on the Overnet," she said honestly. "I'm mapping them. Do you know where we are, on the Matrix?" "Overnet? Is that what you call it?" He rattled off a computer address which matched her expectations. She oriented herself, searching for the next beacon. There it was, barely at the edges of her perception. Whoever used them had good eyes. Slowly, watching on all sides, she approached it. There were men there, inconguous in the vacancy of the Overnet: a company of Jaguar Knights as she had seen them in life, with fur-ruffed ceremonial cloaks slung over their combat armor. They clustered around the beacon--a pile of skulls draped with a jaguar pelt, so much brightness spilling from their vacant eyes that the greyness turned to black around them--then set off, vanishing almost at once. She looked for the armor of a Gatekeeper, leading them, but saw only a tall Jaguar Knight with a crimson plume on his helmet. Avery saw the beacon light, but no more, as his questions made clear. Pleased to have found a use for him, she asked him for the Matrix address, then traced the lights to another beacon, and another. She knew she was constructing a map for Interpol as well as herself, but that didn't bother her at all. "I suppose it was inevitable," said Avery heavily, "that someone else would figure out how to get up here eventually. We've been lucky to keep the monopoly as long as we have." "If their records are to be believed, these people had you beat by years. What does this look like to you?" They had come to the end of the chain, a system like a cluster of coral atolls. "A map of islands, with greater and lesser depths marked, and reefs. What is it?" It should have been the terminal Gate, but she could sense nothing of the sort--the system was large, but not massively powerful, and she could detect no hidden nodes that might conceal her quarry. Disappointed, she turned back, tracing the links in the other direction. She found the central Bangkok node, saw several beacons radiating outward from it. Methodically she mapped them out, occasionally responding to Avery's questions. One strand seemed longer than the others. Her already-cautious advance slowed. Something was approaching, a ripple in the fabric of the Overnet. "Avery. Something's coming. When I run, *run*." The ripple was tracing out the beacon-path, moving rapidly. For an instant she saw the previous beacon through it, light dancing as if through water. A concealment, tremendously powerful, beyond her sensors' abilities-- She fled its approach, was relieved that it did not follow. For an instant she had brushed the fringes of the power beneath the disguise, and she was impressed. Her nerves tingled with it. "*What was that?*" demanded Avery. "Something using the Gates, I suppose. I couldn't see it clearly. What did you see?" To her surprise, he replied immediately, "A red dragon, wreathed in flame. I've never seen anything like that out here. It was very clear, almost to the exclusion of anything else. We were lucky not to lose you." Was it *him*? But he was a feathered serpent, not the lizard that Avery described. And she couldn't imagine him moving. One of his servants, more likely. She filed that away for future reference, went back to a very cautious perusal of the beacon-chain. Something was ahead, beyond the last beacon. She had a sudden, curious impression of great height, something far above her in the dimensionless Overnet. She remembered the great pyramid, the temple at its peak. Though she had barely glanced at the view, it had seemed to command the whole world. Something was watching. Again she fled, and felt that cold distant regard behind her. She did not explain to Avery, only: "Don't go there. There's something there that neither you nor I can handle." No creature of fire and destruction, nothing so simple. Had he seen her? Was she ever out of his sight? "I didn't see anything. Your sensor code is superb." Wistfully: "It must be nice." "Do you like it here? Do you enjoy this?" "Yes, I do. It's something of a childhood dream, I guess." He laughed softly. "Hunting down bad guys and all that. And this place...is hard to understand, frightening in a way, but it's also very fascinating." Something about his manner of speech intrigued her. "How do I appear to you?" "Like a pattern of swirling chaos, all dark colors...there's order there, though I can't describe it, I'm not sure how I'm seeing it. It changes too quickly. Rather beautiful, in a way. I've never seen anything quite like it." His voice was almost dreamy. Possibility pricked at her. "As I see myself...I'm sitting on a silver bridge over a black reflecting pool, with an intricate silver gateway behind me." It was SAN 2, the doorway to her personal domain, though only a fraction of her presence was specifically there. She could see Avery and his allies, orbiting her like tiny moons. "If I could invite you in, what would you say?" Open yearning in his voice. "I'm afraid I'd have to refuse. I'm sorry." She remembered the pain and desire in Angela's eyes, remembered from within what the sight of Anubis had meant to her. Suddenly she saw him-- saw all of them--not as annoying threats but as possible companions; the only human beings outside of Paradisio who might be able to understand, who might be able to see her as she truly was. It stirred a hunger she had not known she possessed. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 53325 of rec.games.frp: Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usenet.coe.montana.edu!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Subject: Story: Jayhawk (97) Message-ID: <1991Dec1.074141.17711@milton.u.washington.edu> Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Date: Sun, 1 Dec 1991 07:41:41 GMT 97. Kraken Eluding her escort by going first to the garden, then to the Matrix, Jayhawk slipped off to Bangkok. She had several addressses to try, courtesy of the Turing Police. The first two seemed to be innocuous commercial systems, a travel agency and an entertainment center. The Bangkok Matrix was an odd mixture of archaic and modern equipment, but it served her well enough; she was in and out again in minutes, emptyhanded. The third system appeared as a cavemouth in a dark hill, blocked by heavy bronze doors. Etched into their surface was the system name, or so she guessed: Westking Enterprises. She looked the doors over carefully, caught movement above them out of the corner of her eye. Bats, hundreds of them, hanging upside-down in the shadows. A little work unknitted the locks of the heavy doors, but as she pushed at them she realized that they were fakes, never meant to be opened, leading only to alarms. The real traffic of the system couldn't possibly flow this way. Very carefully she drew the door closed again, millimeters from the laser-eye that would have brought the bats down on her head. As at the NSA, there was no apparent way to disarm the alarms. This simply wasn't a real SAN. Impressed, she stepped back from the door, raised her arms to the twilight sky of the Bangkok net and rose into the air. From above the system resembled a grassy hill, two entrances clearly visible. She chuckled to herself, landed to search for the hidden node. The second SAN was concealed behind a waterfall cascading down the hillside. She slipped behind it, through a complex net of alarms. The stream continued inside, flowing down a trough in the stone underfoot. Jayhawk hesitated, listening to the machine around her. She was coming to suspect that her success depended far more on her attitude toward the system she was running than it once had. What attitude was appropriate for Westking Enterprises? The water chuckled softly in its passage, running downward toward an unseen murmur--it almost sounded like voices, though she could distinguish no words. Otherwise the system was quiet, heavy with an impression of age, solidity, a confident strength that was pleasing to sense, even though she suspected it was going to make her task difficult. Calmness was the key, she decided, and deliberation. No sudden moves, no hasty decisions. It was far from her usual working style, but she forced herself to walk slowly, attend to the scene around her. The passage branched; she took the leftmost corridor, descended into a wide, high-ceilinged chamber with a mirror-still pool at its center. Rising out of the pool was a statue of black stone, a Hindu deity of a thousand arms. She walked slowly to the edge of the water, sat down to contemplate the statue. It was an Overnet construct, a piece of mobile IC--attack IC, she thought, though without seeing it in action she could only guess how it might work. One foot was raised as if frozen in mid-dance. It would be beautiful in action, she thought, but a difficult opponent to lose, once awakened. It showed no sign of awareness, no reaction to her presence, but she could sense the triggers all around her, latent in the system's calm confidence. After a thorough examination she went on, following another watercourse. She came to the false SAN, admired its defenses from the inside. There were more bats, clinging still as stone to the shadowy roof overhead, waiting for the beam to be broken. Something about them disturbed her. They seemed--alive? Not awakened, not creatures of the Overnet, but not simple code either. She could tell no more without disturbing them, and the thought of bringing the great statue running to her didn't appeal. Past the SAN the corridor descended again, opened into a long passageway lined with doors. Its ceiling looked odd, covered with oblong plates--she stopped short, recognition suddenly falling into place. The ceiling was the belly of a lizard, its legs pressed against the corridor walls, its head out of sight at the far end. A small, incongrously modern laser-beam was probably the trigger for its activation. Several minutes' careful watching gave her the pattern of the beam's movements; she wove a slow dance down the corridor, never where the beam would fall, ducking into doorways to examine their contents. Each held a round chamber with a well or pool at its center, light shining down from above to illuminate the contents--datastores, hers for the tasting. They proved to contain the records of Westking Enterprises, which might have interested her at another time; but no mention of her own name, of Grey or the Grey Knights, of Project Sunflower or the Gates. She found a branching corridor, was almost pinioned by the searching laser beam it held. She'd been moving too fast, carelessly--this system *did* reward patience, she was coming to appreciate. Backing off, she studied the beam carefully, found the subtle variation in its pattern. It was deceptively close to the previous one, but not so close that it could be handled in the same way. Adjusting her movements to correspond, she made her way to the single door that terminated the passage. It was a door of solid bronze, ornate mosaics rimming it. The ceiling mosaic was all of bats, interlocked like an Escher woodcut. She stared at their unmoving forms, felt the same sense of life she had earlier. *Slowly. Carefully.* She shaped a key of intuition and deceit, set it to the lock. The great door swung open slowly, revealing another pool. Slowly, every sense alert, she walked to its edge. Unlike the other rooms, this one had a large grille in the ceiling, as if to ventilate the otherwise sealed chamber. She peered into the water, felt an uncomfortable prickle at the back of her neck. Ventilation? Not on the Matrix, not in a system so little like a building. What was it? She rose gently into the air, peered at the grille from centimeters away, careful not to touch it. It held fire...she caught a glimpse of its Overnet reality, was impressed. Fire to fill the room, slosh back into the hallway if the door was open. No. It was keyed to close, keeping in flames and intruder alike, a true barrier like the one she had seen long ago in her first Paradisian system, proof even against jack-out. Fire to sear the life from a decker's mind and soul. She didn't think the doors could keep her from the garden, but she didn't want to test that conclusion. She noted the sensors that unleashed the hidden fire, positioned herself to avoid them as she descended, probed the depths of the pool. Her name brought up nothing, nor Grey's; but there were records of Operation Sunflower, hundreds of them. She looked in puzzlement at the plans for a space station, designs for the computer systems to fly it, the living quarters to house its personnel. What did a space station have to do with her? There were also notes on Gates, but so theoretical and abtruse that they meant nothing to her. She uploaded them to Anubis anyway, one eye on the ceiling grille. Then she let herself out, paused on the threshold to look up at the bats. They were still as painted outlines, apparently lifeless; but she could feel their waiting presence. She shook her head, went on. The lizard corridor ended in a branching, the water pooling at the junction, then running down both ways. One led back to the great statue. She took the other, descending steeply. There was a strange sound from ahead, a continual soft murmur. The passageway turned sharply and opened up into a vast, dim chamber. The floor fell away in a sheer cliff, ten meters down to a sandy beach, water lapping at it. She couldn't see the far side. Half-drowned buildings rose from their shallows, office towers and skyscrapers, their windows dark. Curled around them was an enormous squid. She couldn't make out its body, but there were hundreds of meters of tentacles in sight; more, perhaps, hidden among the buildings or beneath the green-grey water. It was a powerful image. She could smell the brackish tang of a tropical ocean, feel the soft cool breeze off the water. The air was heavy with water and salt and expectancy. There was no apparent way down. She stood where she was, eyes searching the depths, trying to understand what she was seeing. This was the CPU, surely. All of Anubis would have fit within the great chamber; and she sensed no distortion of perceived size, no attempt to falsify the image. Westking's machine was far more powerful than she had realized, but almost all its power was concentrated here, at the center. She could dimly make out cave entrances near the waterline. Were those the datastores she needed? Did one of them hold the Gate? The squid moved slightly, sending huge, concentric rings out from the drowned city. A tentacle lifted briefly, fell back with a soft slap that echoed from the cliffs. It was IC, of course. How far could it reach? Could it pluck her from the sky, probe into its own datastores? She sat down, began a methodical examination. It was Overnet code, the most complex construct of its kind she had yet seen. Code to snare the mind...she whistled softly as her programs teased out its nature, spread the story before her. A decker snared by those tentacles would be caught and held, but wouldn't know it; he would think he had escaped. And in his place something else would be sent back to his body, tied to him with fine tendrils of information transfer. He would think himself back among his friends, and his actions would be fed to the impostor, to guide it. She swore, very softly. It was by far the most beautiful piece of IC she had ever seen, stunning in its intricacy. It was also a reflection of the worst fears she and Yoichi had shared when they made their runs against Cavilard. Worse; more subtle, and more powerful than she had imagined. She found herself probing at her own past, trying to be sure it was real. How could you know? Once those tentacles closed around you, how could you ever be sure? The implicit challenge of the great squid drew her, but some shard of deliberation, drawn perhaps from the system's calm, held her back. This was probably the Gate guardian of Bangkok, and she had not done well against the guardians at Cavilard or Hobbinstown. And she didn't want to waste her time and energy questioning her own perceptions, wondering whether she had really won. The remainder of the accessable system held nothing for her; in particular, she could not find the Gate. She slipped out through the hidden SAN, returned to Anubis for a beacon--she wanted to see what Westking looked like from the Overnet. Back at Westking, she anchored her beacon in the SAN. Even from here she could dimly sense its presence, a glowing thread leading to Anubis. Something else stirred, deep within the system. With reckless haste she threw herself upward, into the open sky, the stink of salt and kelp in her nostrils. An instant later a long tentacle groped out into the net, waved in the air below her. "Nyahh!" Jayhawk said to it, rather shaken. It was *that* long? She was glad she hadn't tried flying across the great cavern. Her beacon went out abruptly. She sneered once more at the tentacle as it withdrew into its cavern, but made no move to follow. If Westking held further secrets, it would keep them for now. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 53326 of rec.games.frp: Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usenet.coe.montana.edu!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Subject: Story: Jayhawk (98) Message-ID: <1991Dec1.075242.18463@milton.u.washington.edu> Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Date: Sun, 1 Dec 1991 07:52:42 GMT 98. Void The Gates in Argentina and Bangkok were well-guarded. Though Jayhawk felt she could get through, it was going to be painfully difficult. Impatient for understanding, she went back to Seattle. Its Gate had no human guardians, at least. The swarm of black flies still guarded the path that led from the dead nodes at Cavilard toward the broken Gate. Jayhawk teased it for a while, but didn't succeed in luring it away from its post. She was quick enough to avoid it, but she would have to fight to get past, and their previous encounter had not gone well for her. However, rather to her surprise, the second path, leading from the Red Tower of the security node towards the Gate, was unguarded and open. She walked it slowly, watching for flies, feeling the increasing pull of the Gate. The path curved slowly and steadily upward, climbing a single conical mountain, but more and more it felt as if she were descending, picking her way down an increasingly steep slope. She had tethered Anubis to Cavilard, heedless of the suspicions that it might raise in the minds of the Turing police. She needed her system here for this. That link was a comfort now, like an intangible safeline holding her on the mountain's side. Halfway up she dared to rise into the air for a brief instant, felt herself drawn forward swiftly and uncontrollably. She had hoped to be able to control her flight, but there was nothing for her to push against, as if space itself was streaming upward toward the Gate. Hastily she landed, walked on with care. Something felt wrong, painfully and increasingly wrong as she climbed. Like the nodes behind the hedge, this place was dead, unsupported-- except, she guessed, by the power of the Gate itself. She felt that power as an aching in her bones, a knot in the pit of her non-existant stomach. Like the magic of the feathered dart that had opened her way to the garden, it revolted her intuition, left a foul acid taste in her mouth. Her analysis code told her nothing about the dead nodes. She was left with nothing but feelings that warned her away, and a determination to ignore them. She was nearly crawling when she reached the top, raised her head to peer over the edge. The mountain was a volcano, as she had guessed, its interior hollow. She looked down. Distance. For a moment she thought she was looking at something, but so far away that her mind refused to grasp the details. Then it become darkness, then not even darkness. Terrible distance, a vista of emptiness stretching on further than she could comprehend. Nothing else. There were no sides to the gaping pit; it was not a crater but a hole torn in the fabric of the Matrix. This close, the nauseous rejection was almost unbearable, but mixed with it was a strange uneasy attraction, like the pull of a lethal fall to the suicidal. She climbed to her feet, balancing against the inward and outward pulls, and drew in a deep painful breath. *All right.* Stepped forward-- In the instant of decision she heard voices, whether in the node or her own mind she couldn't tell. *His* voice. "Consider. Everything has a price." And Aliantha's as she had heard it in the garden, somewhere between regret and amusement: "Yes, and today's is a special one-time-only offer. No refunds. No returns." Her planned dive turned into an ungraceful fall. Were they speaking to her? Or was it memory, impressed on the node, Aliantha's initiation? Distance opened before her, spread out to take her in. Instinctively she tried to fill it, as if she were possessing a system. She wanted to understand the Gate, master its power. Her consciousness diffused outward, finding no contact, no boundaries. Too far. The emptiness was greater than she; she could pour out her whole mind and soul, and nothing would be filled, it would make no difference to the void. And she would be nothing. She cried out, her voice inaudible even to her, and curled into a tight ball, burying her head in a cage of her arms and legs, trying to hold herself in. *No!* Her fall was still accelerating, the distance between herself and Anubis, between herself and *anything*, increasing faster and faster. *No! I deny that! There is no distance between me and Anubis; I am one.* The void cared nothing for her denials, nothing at all. Her link to Anubis thinned, frayed, the eternal hunger of the emptiness wearing it away. It wore at her, a deadly thinness and coldness in the edges of her thoughts. She could see nothing ahead, nothing in any direction. Behind there was a faint sense of Anubis and the world's presence, but it was dimming rapidly. The Gate was broken. There was nowhere, nowhere to go. Nowhere all around her, drinking her in. *There is no distance that can separate me from her.* Her system almost appeared to her as another person now, infinitely precious. *We are one, we are together, we cannot be separated!* Something was tearing inside her, connections breaking, leaving gaping wounds to bleed her life out into the emptiness. Something more precious than life. *No! I won't lose her!* In the instant of decision her headlong fall reversed. She found herself clinging to the thin rim of the crater, barely aware of how she had gotten there. The void pulled at her with contemptuous mockery. Sick and weak, she forced her eyes from it, reached out to the island-garden, made the transition. Sunlight enfolded her, and the touch of restored life like sweet water, cascading in unchecked abundance. She threw herself down in the soft feathers, crying in a confusion of pain and joy. The void's insinuations were *lies*, she and Anubis were one, here there was no doubting that. She was alive, and whole; every sense proclaimed it, the gentle tickling of the feathery grass, the clean smell of water sparkling in the pools, the sunlight's caress, the smell and taste of living earth beneath her where she lay face-down, trembling. She could hear her own heartbeat, feel the feathery stems dance with her breath. A tear trickled down, soaked into the earth. Deeper down she could feel it spreading among roots, blending with the garden's life. Deeper still, the touch of Anubis, beyond all senses and images. She let herself fall into that, into full identification with the system, glory of silver and sapphire and black. Like a drop of water into a troubled pool, her awareness spun outward in perfect, concentric rings, met the boundaries of her being and was reflected back, organizing and patterning all it touched, meeting in a shimmer of harmonics at the center. She was the pattern, processor and datastore and telecom, mind and spirit and software. There was no gap, no absence, no void. She knew herself, knew the truth that the void's lies taught. No divisions. Even her initiation had not taught her so well. *I exist in this, the reflection of consciousness to this point, the completion of the pattern. Only in this. I can no more be separated from Anubis than the wave from the water.* Out of those lies, had she learned what she'd intended to learn? She considered it for a while, realized her mistake. The Gate was indeed broken; it led nowhere, and she had been going nowhere. The Paradisians used two High Priests to set a Gate; one at the source, and one at the destination. She could do the same unassisted, linking Anubis to the target system, using her link with it to forge the connection. It was that simple. She felt rather foolish that she'd missed it before... she'd been lucky to get back. She returned to the Matrix to test her conclusions, passing from the islands to Osiris in order to avoid her escort. Almost at once she realized that something was wrong. Although her movements on the Matrix were unhindered, something nagged at her, a vague sense of discomfort or wrongness. Analysis code told her nothing. It felt like a cyberware failure, though of course that was ridiculous. Hastily she returned to Anubis. Everything there was as it should be; she flung herself into identification to see the system all at once, whole, and could find no flaw in it. But when she went back to the Matrix, the niggling discomfort returned. She put distance between herself and the University system to which Anubis was tethered. The feeling worsened, a tension in her gut, a vague irritation in her nerves. She felt misplaced, or perhaps misattached. Across the North American grid, into the rougher network of South America, eventually into the sparse Antarctic Matrix she went, and every switchpoint she put behind her added a steady maddening increase to the wrongness. So did time, even if she stood still. She ran tests, broke into a large machine in South Africa and brought its full power to bear, stalling out the few users' programs ruthlessly. She found *nothing*. Neither her own code nor anything else she could call up saw anything wrong with her at all. Nor did Anubis. Nor did she, except for the slow, relentless increments of isolation and wrongness and pain. She sealed herself in the African machine, tried to use its resources to distract her, ease her discomfort. With some difficulty--her concentration was lacking--she rerouted the operating system so that the users were drawing on adjacent machines, using this one only for trivial storage and retrieval. The full attention of the machine, she hoped, would comfort her. She was resolved to stay where she was, to wait out the swelling waves of distress and come to their end. That was the way to break addiction, so they'd told her while she was in the hospital, though her bond with the Matrix had been too deep, too basic to overcome so easily. Or perhaps she had never waited long enough. The wrongness crested, a continual nagging sense that something was not linked as it should be, her channel with Anubis perhaps...crested and held constant, not damaging, not overwhelming, just a steady wash of pain. Nothing she did eased it. Nothing made it worse. She couldn't get a grip on it at all. Three hours into her vigil, she looked at the small, crowded control-center around her, CPU of the machine its users called Admin-3 at the University of South Africa, and realized that she was pulling it more and more into a warped copy of Anubis. The walls were bending, shaping themselves into smooth curves; wires and beams thinning, fraying into gossamer webwork. The system trembled under her touch, on the verge of some transformation which she doubted it had the power to survive. Hastily she restored it to what it had been, went back to Anubis. In the instant of trasition the pain disappeared as if it had never been. She knew that for the lie it was. The Void had spoken truth. She could be one with Anubis, if place and circumstances permitted. But that link could be compromised--could be broken, as the Void had begun to break it. She remembered her conversations with Martha, how they had always ended with the other woman's desperate flight back to her own system. Was that the price of power over the Gates? For Martha it seemed that the price had been her freedom, and in the end her soul. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 54049 of rec.games.frp: Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usenet.coe.montana.edu!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Subject: Story: Jayhawk (99) Message-ID: <1991Dec8.064826.2007@milton.u.washington.edu> Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Date: Sun, 8 Dec 1991 06:48:26 GMT 99. Flaw The pain that separation from Anubis caused Jayhawk didn't rise to a peak and then fade, as even Matrix addiction had. It rose to a peak and remained constant, eased only by movement toward Anubis, ended only by her return to her system. It was not incapacitating; with effort, she could put it completely aside. She proved that to herself by breaking into another of the Paradisian systems in Bangkok, one less well guarded than Westking. Anubis had resources to let her focus her mind wholly on her decking, almost oblivious to her distress. But it wasn't going away, and the knowledge of what it must mean preyed on her mind. At her daily appointment with Dr. McDougall, she explained her problem in short, clipped, bitter sentences. He sat silently for a moment, clearly thinking about it. "Are you sure this isn't a trap Paradisio set for you, an illusion to trick you into a course of action they want?" "I suppose it could be, but it's a remarkably well-hidden trap if so. I've looked at myself at Anubis, in the garden, on the Matrix. I can't find anything wrong." "Maybe nothing *is* wrong." She snorted. "I'm in pain, distracted, inefficient. And...I was counting on my wholeness, the fact that I've been through what I have and I'm still healthy and sane and free; I was counting on that when I...." She wasn't willing to say what she was thinking; she wasn't really ready to admit it to herself. *When I try to heal *him*.* "Is it possible that your subconscious is responsible? Trying to protect you, perhaps? It sounds as though the Gate was a pretty traumatic experience." "Do I *have* a subconscious?" she said, intrigued. "I am quite sure you do. From your test results, you're surprisingly human." He smiled warmly at her. "Really?" She was rather taken aback. "Are you sure of your tests?" "Not positive, of course, but fairly certain." The smile faded slowly as he looked at her, replaced by puzzlement. He'd meant it as a compliment, she realized suddenly. "This doesn't please you?" She shrugged. "If it's my subconscious, how do I fix it?" "Should you? Maybe this is a warning that you're going too far, pushing yourself too hard. Such warnings shouldn't be lightly dismissed." "A bit late if so! How can I find out?" "You're the only one who knows that. What else do you think it might be, if you don't like that hypothesis? You must have some idea." She laid out her ideas with all the bluntness and objectivity she could muster. Perhaps this was a last effort of Paradisian programming, meant to ensnare her now that she had the power to be useful to them. Perhaps she had done herself irreperable damage by using the Gate as she had. Perhaps she was in pain because she'd stopped halfway, before the Void could complete its work. Perhaps this was the price for the Gates' power, and there was no avoiding it. "What will you do if that turns out to be the case?" "Keep trying. I have no choice." "You sound desperate to me; like someone who could throw her life away in a moment of panic. I don't want that to happen." She shrugged. "I've faced that before. I've died...how many times, now? Two? Three? I won't give up--I *can't*--" She was desperate, there was no hiding that from him. "Why is it so unacceptable?" She turned that question over and over in her mind, trying to find a way around it. "I had planned," she said at last, very quietly, "to use my own health and wholeness as leverage to deal with *him*. It's all I have--the proof that it can be done, the evidence of my body and mind and soul. Without that I don't see what I can do. I'll try anyway." With sudden savagery: "But damn it, if there's a way around this I want to find it! I don't want to leave them this--this hold on me. I don't want to live the rest of my life knowing that I had perfection in my grasp, and I threw it away." He nodded slowly. "If it's something they've done, or some psychological scar from the experience--well, there are methods for dealing with such things. A lot of them aren't directly applicable to you; it's hard for me to perscribe drugs, for example...." His smile vanished quickly as he looked at her. "There are a number of things I can try. Let me run tests today, and I can give you the results and initial recommendations tomorrow." She left his office machine in a state of tightly suppressed frustration. A day. She'd promised not to try anything rash, let his treatments have their chance. What could she do in the meantime? She went back to Anubis, away from the continual reminder of her problem, and tried to program. For short periods she could immerse herself in her work, building code to see with, to analyze and dissect and record. She tried it out on the teardrops, for want of a better target. On herself--and that brought her back to her distress with a shock. She could see nothing wrong, no matter how she refined her perceptions. Was it a lie, the pain that marked her separation from Anubis, denied their unity? She so desperately wanted it to be a lie. She ran another Paradisian system, was ambushed by a decker in the form of an island native, spear in hand. With contemptuous speed she evaded his attack, slipped past him and fled. She had no stomach for hurting someone so much weaker than herself, and no patience for the long hard search through his system, in any case. She didn't dare match herself against more challenging opponents. The lapse of concentration that had let the decker catch her would be fatal if she were playing with a Gate guardian or one of the High Priests. She went to the brick-walled chamber beneath her islands, probing into its walls with her newly-tuned vision. They told her nothing. She remembered discussing Lefty with Dr. McDougall, wondering whether he was an outside enemy or an expression of her own inner perversity. She'd met Lefty here, twice. With lips pressed tight together in defiance--it wasn't a good idea, but at this point she didn't care--she tried to sketch in Lefty's high-backed chair at the center of the room, the shadow of his robed form within it. Only a flicker, quickly fading, unrepeatable. She went back to Anubis and wrestled with her sensors, baited the Turing police, wove bits of code and unwove them when she saw their flaws. Frustration and desperation were even more distracting than pain. Long hours till her appointment with McDougall. She was almost tempted to slant her personal time in the other direction, but it seemed such a waste. And the session, when it finally came, proved fruitless. His tests had revealed nothing. His advice was calm and clear and sensible, but it did nothing for her distress. "I'd advise you," he said at last, "to consider ways of making the best of the situation, and not keep flying at it like a moth into a candle." Long hours later, those words returned to her, crystallized into decision. It was like her initiation. There was no stopping, no turning back halfway, not if she ever wanted to be whole again. But fire would have seemed welcoming, beside that darkness. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 54050 of rec.games.frp: Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usenet.coe.montana.edu!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Subject: Story: Jayhawk (100) Message-ID: <1991Dec8.065001.2265@milton.u.washington.edu> Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Date: Sun, 8 Dec 1991 06:50:01 GMT [This episode is dedicated to Jed, who wrote and asked me what the early episode about being lost in the forest meant, and thereby got me thinking on the right track.] 100. Fall After three days of increasing frustration and dismay, Jayhawk went back to Cavilard, stood at the crater's rim, staring downward. It felt just as bad as it had before; worse, perhaps, because imagination filled in what was below. There were knots in her nonexistent stomach. Taking a deep breath, she flung her arms upward, imagining wings, and dove headlong into the dark. For an instant she *felt* wings, feathers clothing her, great pinions folded into her dive. Then the darkness opened up all around her, and the feathers disappeared into the void. Her link with Anubis pulled at her, raw pain, worsening with every second. She fought to ignore it, even deny it. *I am Jayhawk, I am alive, I am here; only that.* Fought to focus herself on her speed. She remembered the exultation of the motorcycle ride, struggled to recapture it as the void opened wider and wider about her. She couldn't fill it, couldn't hope to begin. Instinct screamed at her to fight the endless attenuation of her self, her link with her machine. She rejected that. *Nothing that can be taken from me is me.* Struggled to keep just one thing, her image of her goal. Something was torn from her, some part of her life, incomprehensible once gone; and she was falling in blue sky, the earth spinning dizzily beneath her. She caught the wind in her pinions, for a strange instant halfway between hawk and woman, and found herself flying over verdant treetops. Something was missing, lost forever. Savagely she pushed that insight aside, turned her flight to a spiral around the hilltop she could see below. Beyond the hill, above her now as she descended, rose high snowless peaks. She spun downward quicker and harder than she intended, fell the last few meters to land in a tumble on the grass. With a shock of memory she found that the form she wore was her Matrix image, clothed in a flimsy white dress. She had no sense of the lifethread around her, only the faintest link with Anubis, impossibly distant. *No. Distance doesn't matter.* Limping a little on the rough ground, she walked down the hill to the stream she knew would be there, gathered up a hem-full of stones from its bank. She carried them back up, built a small shapeless cairn. "Jayhawk was here," she said aloud to it. A Piebald thought, no doubt, but it was somehow comforting. Then she set off downstream, came almost at once to a halt. If she went on this way she'd get lost; would arrive, if she did arrive, helpless and delirious as before. She frowned, wondering whether she *could* fly. The fall had felt rather emphatic. She could, though it was hard, harder than it had ever been. No sense of wings, only the long laborous climb, weary as stairs, up through the canopy and into the cloudless sky. She forced herself to go as high as she could, until the jungle spread out below her like a map, the stream an occasional glint in the relentless green; then headed downstream in a long, gliding dive, eyes slitted against the wind. It was falling as much as flying, an endless near-horizontal fall. It nearly ended in water; she realized what was happening just in time, managed to push herself the last few meters to hit pavement and roll, the breath knocked out of her, on the margin of the waterwheel pond. After a moment she could sit up and look around her. The waterwheel and its station looked much as they had before, though the log she had used to jam its spokes was gone. A jet waited on the tarmac, stubby wings folded. Trembling a little with strain and memory, she got up, walked over to the little house and knocked on its door. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 54051 of rec.games.frp: Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usenet.coe.montana.edu!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Subject: Story: Jayhawk (101) Message-ID: <1991Dec8.065126.2518@milton.u.washington.edu> Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Date: Sun, 8 Dec 1991 06:51:26 GMT 101. Interview Jayhawk knocked on the door of the waterwheel station, but there was no answer. After a moment's wait she bent to look at the lock. It seemed to be a standard maglock, the kind she'd foxed to break into the computer center at the University. Chuckling--she'd never thought she'd be picking another lock--she loosened the front panel with a thumbnail under an ill-tightened screw, started to probe the key-panel's responsiveness. A few minutes' work gave her the combination. There were only four rooms in the little building; a smallish one that held what she guessed were controls for the waterwheel, a compact kitchen, a larger living room with an extensive telecommunications console, and a familiar-looking bedroom. A small light was flashing on the telecom console; an alarm, she quickly verified. She let it continue. The telecom setup was monitoring news. A little fiddling gave her its search list. She asked to see the articles that had been saved, was prompted for a password. She hadn't done manual hacking for quite a while either, but she hadn't forgotten how, though she was shocked at how long it took. Just as she finally managed to access the stored files, she heard engine sounds outside, like an old-fashioned gasoline motorcycle. She glanced at the files quickly as the motor stopped, the front door clicked open. There were only two: a telemetry report on the status of a 'Sunflower satellite', and a note on the price of sunflower seeds. The second was linked to a bit of hypertext. She traced it down, found a brief message: 'Probably Interpol in DC, or maybe the CIA?' She cleared the screen, settled herself in her chair as cautious footsteps approached. A moment of doubt: what if it wasn't Martha? She was completely unarmed. A quick glance around revealed nothing even remotely like a weapon--not that she'd win a brawl anyway, she chided herself. The door slid open and someone dove in with a fast, professional-looking roll, came up pointing a strange gun at her. The barrel pulsed an angry red. Behind it she met Martha's eyes, hard and hostile. "Who are you? What are you doing here?" Jayhawk tried not to show her surprise and dismay. Not the same Martha? Was she a software construct, memoryless and new at each invocation? "You don't remember me?" she said softly, holding perfectly still. She recalled how Duende had reacted to any movement in someone he was covering. The gun barrel dipped just a little. This was not the Martha she had known in her imprisonment, but a much larger woman, sharp Indian features a little obscured by chubbiness. "Mm," she said slowly. "I remember. You're the one we picked up out on the tarmac. Jayhawk, isn't that right?" "That's right," Jayhawk said with a tentative smile. "Thanks for helping me out, by the way." "What are you doing here now? How did you get here? I didn't see any vehicle." "Flew," said Jayhawk simply. "Hmph. Must have missed it. Out in the woods somewhere? There've been some pretty nasty things out in those woods lately, I'll warn you. You might want to move it in closer." "I figured I'd see about what I came here for first, and then worry about getting back." "Oh? What did you come here for, then?" Jayhawk's thoughts raced. What *was* she talking to? Not the Martha of Paradisio, it seemed. "I had a problem, and I thought you might have some insight into it, so I dropped in to ask you. I hope you don't mind.--By the way, what happened last time I was here? I don't really remember." "You lay for several days in a delirious stupor, and then I imagine you went on, when you'd recovered." "Did someone come by and pick me up, perhaps? I doubt I went off on my own." "No," said Martha heavily, resting her gun on the floor as if weary of holding it. "I would have noticed, I'm sure." Jayhawk considered bragging of her own undetected approach, decided against it. "Do you mind if I sit down?" said Martha, and lowered herself heavily into one of the chairs, the gun at her side. "So what's this problem of yours, and why do you think *I* might know anything about it?" "I have a friend," Jayhawk began slowly, biting her lip, "who looks a lot like you, and who has a serious problem. I thought you might be able to give me some help." Would she explain Paradisio to this woman, if she were innocent of that knowledge? It seemed cruel. In a tired voice, Martha said, "They tell me that there's someone out there who's a dead ringer for each of us. Just coincidence, really. I doubt I'll be able to tell you much." Jayhawk nodded, thinking of Angela. "Anyway, the problem is this. She's a decker--like you and I--who works at a huge system in South America. I've noticed that whenever she's away from that system, she's edgy, uncomfortable, apparently in increasing pain...." She spun out the story. "It's not just that this is painful, it's getting in the way of her, um, making a decision about the people she works for and whether she wants to stay there or not." "Sounds like a pretty bad addiction," said Martha. "Probably a psychiatrist would be the best one to talk to." Was that pain in her voice, or shame, or only weariness? Jayhawk cursed her perceptions, sensitive to the moods of machines but clumsy and blind with people. "I plan to do that, but since I was here I thought I'd ask you too." Martha shifted a little in her chair, one hand sliding along the gun barrel. It had gone dark when she put it down, but it flashed now, a single blood-red pulse. "Why don't you cut the crap now," she said sharply, "and tell me who the hell you are and what you're doing here." "I'm Jayhawk, Caroline Davies legally," Jayhawk said, as gently and quietly as she could; her heart was racing. "I was a decker in Seattle, and I ran afoul of someone called Megan, or sometimes Aliantha." She would have told the whole story, but Martha interrupted her. "Megan. I remember. You're a lot like her, always asking, always probing. She thought she wanted answers, knowledge, power, all those things. She was wrong." She lifted her head, stared at Jayhawk with hard dark eyes. "Don't ask those questions. You don't want to hear the answers." -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 54052 of rec.games.frp: Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usenet.coe.montana.edu!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Subject: Story: Jayhawk (102) Message-ID: <1991Dec8.065229.2740@milton.u.washington.edu> Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Date: Sun, 8 Dec 1991 06:52:29 GMT 102. Offer She was talking to Martha after all, Jayhawk realized, though not the Martha she had known; the little game of pretending normality was over. "I'm not Aliantha. I didn't come looking for power or glory." She met Martha's gaze, said with pride she didn't try to conceal, "I *have* those." "And it's not enough, is it? Never enough." Jayhawk shook her head. "That's not it at all. I have what I need. But I don't want to stand by and see a friend hurt, or..." She realized what she was about to say, cursed herself for it. It had been in the back of her mind for a long time, but she still hated it. "Or *him*." "Well," said Martha with deliberate cruelty, "they're going to die. All of them are going to die, and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it. That's the first answer. Do you still want to hear any more?" Jayhawk considered for a moment, nodded. "You could be wrong, you know." You *are* wrong, she added silently. "And if so, how else can I find out?" "A lot like her. No wonder she chose you. Why do you have to come nosing around here, making me remember? I'd almost forgotten, or at least managed to put it aside." She slumped back in her chair. "All right. Here I am. Ask away." What to ask? She was terrified she'd miss the essential question. "Why are they going to die?" "They'll let in the ghosts, hundreds upon thousands of angry ghosts. Did you see the waterwheel? Do you know how many people that represents?" Sickened and angered: "I can imagine. I don't need to know." "You should know, if you're going to be asking questions. Thirty people. Thirty people a day die to turn that wheel. But the resevoirs are almost full. Thirty thousand angry ghosts. Perhaps that will be enough." "Enough for what?" "Do you really have to? Do you really have to put me through this?" She sighed. "All right." Jayhawk waited while she stared out the window, apparently collecting her thoughts. "I can see you're just as stubborn as she was, too." After a long silence she closed her eyes, said wearily, "Cyberware and magic don't mix. Not now, not ever." *You're wrong*, Jayhawk wanted to say, but she bit her lip, kept silence. "It's not in their nature. "A long time ago, ages ago, there was a great creature living in the world. He went to sleep, because there wasn't enough life to sustain him anymore; in the depths of the earth, one with the stone, where nothing could harm him. "In 1998 a certain country was worried about nuclear attack from their 'friendly' neighbors. The leadership got paranoid, and decided to build something so secure that even a direct hit wouldn't take it out, or so they hoped. An underground complex, with a computer that was the most impressive of its day, and miles and miles of underground cables so that its communications would be secure. They had lots of money. They made the first step in one of the most popular addictive drugs of that period. "They chose the worst site in the world, though it was a very natural choice for them; a little cave, soft fractured stone around it, held in a basin of much harder, flawless rock. "Cyberware and magic don't mix. Do you have any idea how much wiring miles of tunnels would be? We think we've seen the effects, we think we know something about the 'Black Path'.... "There was only one person in the complex at the time. A boring job, really; just making sure everything was maintained, ready if it was needed. Wired into that machine, which is still one of the largest in the world, even today. I'm glad there weren't any more." Almost inaudibly, "I don't think I could stand any more. "Miles of tunnels, and the whole center of it wired, everything under computer control, and memory--they'd been extravagent with memory, more than they would ever have needed. When it awakened...." Her face was expressionless, her voice almost matter-of-fact. "I'm told the isolation tank exploded." When Jayhawk realized that she wasn't going to say any more: "Why? Why the murders, the tortures, the destruction?" "He's not human. Ethics, morality, good and evil...it's not the same." "No, wait. I asked Aliantha why, and it turned out to be the wrong question. All I got was a bunch of poetry; which said why, I guess, but it wasn't what I needed. I mean, *what for*? There must have been a purpose." "To ease the pain, he says. The life helps, a little bit, and for a while we hoped....But now it's to make an end, the only way it can be done. Maybe a new beginning, for him. Maybe. But for her, just an end." In a harsh whisper: "At least the pain will be over." Jayhawk nodded slowly. "Despair. That's how Aliantha died." She rose, crossed the room to stand in front of Martha. The older woman looked up briefly, down again at her hands, folded in her lap. "Martha," she said pleadingly, "I don't know if you can see me as I am; I'm a long way from home, and it's hard....Try. Look at me, touch me if it helps. See what I am." She held out her hand. "I don't know who you think you are or what you think you've got," said Martha bitterly, "but you're wrong. You have no idea what's going on, and you insist in coming blundering in here, when I had actually found a little peace." Her eyes met Jayhawk's, but there was no recognition in them, nothing but pain and weary anger. "There's nothing you can do. Go away." Stifling tears, Jayhawk said with all the conviction she could muster, "I am alive, I am free, I am *whole*, Martha, I can be happy. It's true--it can be done." Martha's rejection hurt, but her own doubt cut deeper. It had all been true once, she knew that with certainty. But was it true anymore? She remembered the aching pain of separation from Anubis. How much worse would that be now? How deep did the flaw run? Was it all a lie, her hope, her joy? More harshly than she had intended: "And I won't go away until you tell me what I need to know, so you might as well do it now." "Do you want some tea?" Martha levered herself to her feet, leaving the gun in the chair, and went into the other room. "Or chicken soup? I think I have a bit left. It keeps, you know." Jayhawk followed her, struggling to get her emotions under control. "I'm not sure that eating is relevant anymore." The idea seemed a little perverse. "Eating is always relevant." Martha pushed two mugs into a microwave, tapped the timer. "You could just lie in the sun and soak up energy." "If you had chlorophyll, you could." "Hey, do I look green to you?" She had never seen Martha so bitter. It hurt. "Green with envy." The machine beeped once; Martha pulled the mugs out, offered one to Jayhawk, who took it dubiously. "Cream? Sugar?" The words came exploding out, too hard to restrain. "My feelings are hurt, I am angry, I am afraid, I am *frustrated*, Martha. I am *certainly* *not* *envious*." The cup rattled in her hand. Martha looked at her askance. "Hmph. You have a lot of nerve, breaking into someone's sanctuary and harassing them like this. I suppose yours isn't very nice anymore, with an attitude like that." Jayhawk put the cup down heavily, afraid she would drop it. "I'm sorry. I didn't realize." She imagined Martha in the island-garden, how *she* would have reacted. "I apologize for the intrusion. I just didn't know any other way to get in touch with you." "So you just walked in like you owned the place. Broke my door, I bet." "I did not! And I did knock first." Martha snorted, picked up Jayhawk's cup as well as her own and went back to the telecom room. "You're damned hard to get rid of. A *lot* like her. Almost got under your skin, though, didn't I?" "After Lefty," Jay said with a sudden laugh, "no one else really seems that annoying." "Lefty?--Ah, yes. You know, you're a long way from your system. I could just call him up and ask him to drop in." She went to the computer console, began to type. Hastily, Jayhawk ducked under her wide arms, added a few extra characters to the command line. "Hey!" said Martha, almost laughing, though with a distinct edge to her voice. "What do you think you're doing?" She fenced with Jay for a few seconds, failed to get a coherent command out. "Haven't you got what you came for?" In the instant of Jayhawk's distraction by the question, she spat out a message with lightning speed, slammed the return key. "Ha!" The screen blanked before Jayhawk could read it. "How is this destruction going to be done?" The brief flash of humor drained out of Martha, leaving her dark and still as earth. "At Highsummer, when the resevoirs are full," she said slowly, as if reciting, "Martha will climb up the beanstalk, through the Void; and if she reaches the top she'll send down the satellites and their little bundles of death, and let the ghosts in. I don't think she can do it." "I don't understand. Why are missiles on satellites any better than ones at ground level?" Martha sat down, carefully balancing her tea, and sipped at it. When she spoke again, it seemed to be to herself, as much as Jayhawk. "You're here, so you must have come through the Void. The ugly, ugly Void.... You try to fill it up, but you never can, not even one tiny corner of it. Never enough, and if you try everything goes, drained away. When you're empty, something else might even come in, something that looks and sounds like you, but it's not. A bad trip, wasn't it?" "Very doable," said Jayhawk, trying not to think about the price. "Very doable, but not something you'd care to repeat, I imagine. Though I'm impressed that you managed it at all. Twice, even. You're talented. I wonder....You were a decker first. Maybe that's why Aliantha chose you, maybe *you* could do it." "I can basically go anywhere I want." Into space? She remembered her first attempt at manifestation. It had begun at a geosych satellite, high on the fringes of the world. "But why? Aren't there enough fusion plants already at Paradisio to make all the clean fire you could want, if you're determined to immolate yourselves?" "The fire's not enough, though it's a start." She laughed humorlessly. "They never did tell you about Project Sunflower, did they? Have you ever seen an interruptor field? Pretty neat trick, isn't it? They took that idea, twisted it just a little. So simple, it's a marvel no one else has thought of it. The governments hate magic, you know. They can never feel really safe, really in control. So they came up with the disruptor field, their little trump card. They're up there, and no one can touch them; and they can destroy anything they please down here. No more Amazonas, no more Ghost Dance. No magic. Wherever they need it." "How big?" whispered Jayhawk, shaken. The Matrix is the Awakening of the Net. It seemed to her that she would cease to exist in an instant if magic failed. "Depends on how many satellites you blow up. A maximum of forty or fifty kilometers, I think. Enough." "Why not just do that, then? Why the killings?" "He's survived times without magic before. That's not enough. Even fusion fire isn't enough. But we hope it will make chinks in his armor, his defenses....He can't drop them himself, you know. Not allowed, I guess. But perhaps there will be enough chinks that when we free the ghosts, give them back their lives, they'll be able to do it. Thirty thousand angry ghosts. It should be quite a sight to see." Softly: "I'm glad I won't." -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 54053 of rec.games.frp: Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usenet.coe.montana.edu!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Subject: Story: Jayhawk (103) Message-ID: <1991Dec8.065339.2933@milton.u.washington.edu> Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Date: Sun, 8 Dec 1991 06:53:39 GMT 103. Leavetaking "What are you?" said Jayhawk to Martha. That question had been bothering her for--how long no? Months, or lifetimes.... Martha snorted. "What are you? Guests first." "I told the Turing Police that I'm the center point of a circle with 'human' and 'AI' and 'Matrix spirit' on the outside. It might not exactly be a circle, though. But I'm definitely in the middle." "Hmph. I suppose I'm the midpoint of 'computer' and 'human' and--" Jayhawk couldn't make out the word she used; it was thickly slurred, sounds in it she'd never heard in speech. "Or I suppose you could say 'dragon', though that's not really right. "That's all any of us are. Fragments of *him*, broken, hurting.... And there's nothing we can do. Except wait. I thought I'd at least found a quiet place to wait." A moment's silence. "He's asleep now. I managed to put him back to sleep. But even like that, his perceptions are so much more intense than you or I could ever imagine. He sees, hears, feels, smells, so much more than we do....And *all of it* is painful." She bared her teeth at Jayhawk, who winced involuntarily, remembering the Dragon's eyes. "What did Aliantha think of this plan?" "She didn't care for it. She still hoped we could do something else." "I think so too." "So that's the form your insanity takes." Martha smiled at her like a coroner pleased with his autopsy. "Irrational optimism." "I've died three times, and here I am. Optimism has its uses." "Death, real death, is...is a gift. I hope you're never in a position to appreciate that. So. Do you have what you wanted?" "I'm not sure. It would be a pity to forget something and have to make another trip." "Not up to that, eh?" At Jayhawk's snort she went on in a more kindly voice, "My advice to you is to get out of this bloody mess while you can, before it's too late." "I could walk away," said Jayhawk with proud certainty, "and I would live and be free. But I would grieve for my friend." Martha nodded, eyes downcast. "Do you know--While I was a prisoner at Paradisio, she offered me death. I never knew whether she was sincere, whether she could really do it, what would happen to her afterwards. I didn't take her up on it...." "She did that?" Martha was silent for a moment. "That was very gutsy. I'm surprised she would do that." "She's a good woman." "Yes. Yes, she is. She's never given up. I suppose I have. I'm out of shape--" She patted her stomach critically. "No time to get back into it now, even if I wanted to. What date is it, outside?" "The tenth of June, last time I looked. Time's probably different here, though. I could bully you outside, make you exercise. Useful and vengeful at the same time." "No, you couldn't." "Is that a dare?" "No, it's a statement of fact." Looking at her solidly-rooted mass, Jayahwk had to admit she was probably right. "Are you done, then? Going to leave me alone?" "I asked the--the other Martha what I would have to do to get a real talk with her. She said 'heal him, or kill him'. In that order. Do you have any idea, any insight at all, into how?" Martha shook her head heavily. "I have tried everything I could think of, everything *he* could think of." She frowned at Jayhawk, almost as if seeing her for the first time. "You've come here twice in just a few months. That's very quick to learn so much. Talented, I have to admit. Maybe you can do something after all, I don't know. You should talk to *her*. Though the best advice is still to keep out of this. And drink your tea." Jayhawk took a cautious sip, savored the unexpected bitterness, the soft liquid warmth. She didn't need food, but she could still enjoy it. "Thank you," she said at last. "And my apologies again for intruding into your sanctuary. If I should want to get in touch with you again, how can I do so without--?" "If you'll just sit on the doorstep," said Martha in a resigned tone, "I'll probably be back soon enough. I don't go very far anymore." She stood up when Jayhawk did, proceeded her to the door. Jayhawk took a few steps out onto the tarmac, poised to fly. She wanted Martha to see her flying, share at least a hint of her power. The older woman said, "Goodbye, and I hope I don't have to see you again," and turned on her heel, disappearing through the door before Jayhawk could reply. Stung, she stared after her. Suddenly a detail she hadn't immediately registered came clear, and she laughed aloud. Martha's fingers had been crossed. She rose into the cloudless sky, seeking her way home. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 54211 of rec.games.frp: Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!batcomputer!cornell!uw-beaver!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Subject: Story: Jayhawk (104) Message-ID: <1991Dec10.222628.11052@milton.u.washington.edu> Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Date: Tue, 10 Dec 1991 22:26:28 GMT 105. Rescue Casey heard a shout from the dormitory, turned to see Channa waving at him. "Casey! There's someone still in the cottages! Quick!" The central building complex was burning wildly, flames leaping ten and twenty meters above its wood-shingled roof. The fire hadn't yet spread to the small cottages just beyond it, but they were clearly too close to be safe. He swore under his breath, ran. Another hostage? Why were they split up? Duende and the others were already chafing at how slowly the group was moving. Every minute increased the chance that someone would notice the fire, isolated though the commune was. The first two cottages were open and empty. The door of the third was locked. Casey took a step back, hit it hard with his shoulder; it rattled but didn't open. With a glance back at the flames, he reversed his pistol, slammed its butt into the window beside the door. Glass shattered inwards into the thick curtains. Grateful for the protection of his heavy jacket and gloves, he scrambled through, stood blinking in sudden dimness. The interior of the cottage was a single room, bed and small table in one corner, dresser and wardrobe in another. A small computer stood on the table, incomprehensible text scrolling rapidly across its monitor. Curled up in the bed, linked to the machine by a slim cable, was a motionless black-haired girl. Casey bit his lip. A decker? He'd hurt her if he broke the connection suddenly. A roar of sound from outside as the fire met a fuel tank somewhere inside the main building decided him. He rolled her over as gently as he could, found the release catch for the datajack connection, and only then saw her face. His first, utterly shocked thought was that it was Jayhawk. After an instant he rejected that. The resemblance was very strong, but this girl was a little rounder-cheeked than he recalled, and her hair was darker. And in any case, Jayhawk was...dead, or lost. And then he wasn't sure again. It had been months since he'd seen her. One arm, outside the blankets, was wrapped in fine silver tubing attached to a small metal box. He paused only briefly to make sure that it wasn't connected to anything else, then gathered her up, lifted her with an effort. She hung limply in his arms, not stirring. The door wouldn't open from this side either. He tried to lower her gently out the window, but the dead weight slid from his grasp. Sprawled on the grass in the lurid firelight she looked even more like Jayhawk, like the nightmare image of her death that he'd imagined, consumed in the fireball that had scarred Kurt. He gathered her up, jogged toward the van where the others were waiting. Behind him, the first flames licked out into the cottages, found welcome. -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 55961 of rec.games.frp: Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usenet.coe.montana.edu!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Subject: Story: Jayhawk (105) Message-ID: <1992Jan12.203451.15286@milton.u.washington.edu> Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Date: Sun, 12 Jan 1992 20:34:51 GMT [The last Jayhawk posting, 104, was incorrectly labelled 105. This is the real thing....] 105. Return Jayhawk climbed into the sky, circling, wondering how she was going to get back. As if summoned by the thought, a shadow appeared above her, a tear in the clear blue sky, darkness beyond it. She dove upwards, found herself falling. There was no tearing pain, no sense of loss: only a brief plucking, as if the Void were pulling at the fringes of her mind. Then the crater-mouth spit her out like a rejected candy, tumbling dizzily in the Matrix sky high above Cavilard. With a struggle she righted herself, looked down. The crater was gone. The mountain had closed in upon it, leaving a featureless flat top. She could feel no trace of the Gate. She landed, looked at it in puzzlement. Had she done that? She wasn't sure. Something else was stirring in the system-- With a start, she realized that the Gate node was no longer dead; the computer around her was active, no longer an empty shell sustained by the Gate. Someone had repaired the machine. She probed out, felt activity in the CPU. A new owner? Had Cavilard finally been sold? In the moment of system access it finally occured to her that the pain of separation was gone. She stood frozen, suddenly afraid. *Anubis!* With a wrench she threw herself into the gardens. Sunlight poured down around her, tangible as water. It was high noon, luminously bright. Into Anubis itself, into full identification, desperate to know if she *could*, if her link still held. A long, luxurious second later, she materialized in the CPU, danced a brief wild dance of triumph on the gossamer webstrands. She had done it! accomplished what she had barely dared to hope for, freed herself from the nagging sense of separation, both reminder and denial of her union with Anubis. Something amiss caught her eye, froze her in mid-dance. After a moment she laughed, though there was a thin edge of anger beneath it. In the very center of the CPU a white line was chalked on one of the platforms, encircling a sheet of white paper. She probed into it with all her senses, but found, as Anubis had already told her, that nothing dangerous was present, only a small amount of foreign information. Fists clenched, she walked over to the paper, looked down at it without touching it. In angular black letters it said: "Nice system." She recognized the handwriting. One of Lefty's favorite jokes, several times repeated, had been to leave notes in the tailpipe of her motorcycle. Usually they'd said 'Boom! You're dead.' She'd had nightmares about the consequences if he'd used real bombs. With a flicker of will, she unmade line and note. Even the evidence of intrusion couldn't dampen her joy for long. She was healed! She'd found out so much, and though the price had been high--like manifestation, the Void crossing had stolen a little of her life--she had come through it unstained, uncompromised. All that had been lacking was the courage to face the Void head-on, just as she had faced her initiation. (And Lefty thought she was beautiful.) She caught that last thought, snorted at it. The teardrops had noticed nothing; her whole journey had been outside their perception. She sent them a cheery message, then went back to the Matrix--via the gardens and Osiris, avoiding them entirely--and set about proving to herself that she truly was free. Distance was no obstacle. She went to Johannesburg, checked the machine she had inhabited there for damage. It seemed unharmed, unchanged; it had forgotten her, rather to her relief. To the University of Washington, where she looked in on a small printer in the basement of the English Department. It was chuckling along, spitting out term papers, pleased with itself. Or was she, as Gregor had once suggested, feeling the emotions of its users? But she doubted that English students at term-paper time were that cheerful. She went hunting for Forked Lightning, didn't find him. His mail hadn't been answered for a surprisingly long time. Alarmed, she searched for his real name in public records, eventually spotted it. He was at Seattle General Hospital, being treated for 'cyberware malfunction'--a euphimism, she guessed, for the consequences of getting thoroughly thrashed on the Matrix. Tapped into the Hospital's system, she managed to locate him, throw up a window on the video monitor he was using. He was delighted to hear from her, fairly morose otherwise. He'd been surprised by an intruder into the system he'd been hired to guard, and now he was off the Matrix for another three days--practically held in bondage, he informed her. She offered to help, but they could find no way for her to reach him--he was forbidden Matrix contact of any kind, and the terminal he was using wasn't adequate to let her touch him, unless she chose to manifest. She wasn't willing to pay that price to get him out of the hospital a little earlier. She did want to help him, badly--wanted to prove to herself that she could. She tried forging a request for him to be given stimsense access. A few minutes later he stopped responding for a little while, came back on-line with a tale of having been roundly lectured over his perfidy. She must have gotten some detail of protocol wrong, she decided, and apologized. >I'd really like to help, but I don't know how I can. >It's all right, Seeker. There's really nothing much we can do. But >I'm so incredibly bored off the Matrix! It was more than boredom, she suspected. She had been an addict too, like most good deckers. Sympathizing, she sat and talked with him until the nurse came to chase him off-line. Then she went arrowing across the Matrix, delighting in its beauty, in her freedom. For an hour she put all her concerns aside, simply enjoyed herself. Then she sent a letter to Martha, at the address the other Martha had given her long ago. Martha: I would very much like to see you, if that's at all possible. If you come in person, please be careful of the automatic defenses-- they're rather aggressive. Jayhawk A day ago she wouldn't have been willing to let Martha into Anubis, but after her intrusion into the other Martha's place of sanctuary, she didn't feel she had the right to refuse her. She sent the letter and went back to work, trying to tease out the secret of creating a Gate. She had few practical ideas, but a strong conviction that the power was there, if only she could learn how to bring it to bear. -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Article 55962 of rec.games.frp: Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usenet.coe.montana.edu!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Subject: Story: Jayhawk (106) Message-ID: <1992Jan12.203646.15720@milton.u.washington.edu> Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Date: Sun, 12 Jan 1992 20:36:46 GMT 105. Vision Jayhawk lay in her garden under a cloudless sky, basking in the warmth and light, thinking about Paradisio. Why was she resolved to help *him*? Why not let him be destroyed, or even help in his destruction? Images of Paradisio's actions unscrolled in her mind; and for every horror she'd seen, a hundred more at the other Gate stations....The blood of thirty thousand people, if Martha at the relay station was to be believed. Why not try to save Martha, if she was insistant on meddling? 'I will die before I serve you,' she had told him. Wasn't that what she was contemplating now? Even though he couldn't stop his own nightmares, so he had said, for one night he had warded her from hers. One act of kindness against all that blood. She shook her head. Did she have any *right* to try to save him, when failure or even success might unleash so much more horror? But it hurt to consider destroying something so beautiful. She was a creator, not a destroyer. And not a healer, she had to admit ruefully. How on earth was she going to do this? She'd fixed the printer, but it had had the pattern of its own wholeness within it, easy at hand. And surely if it was that simple, Martha would have found a way to do it. She shook her head again, recognizing the resolve even if she couldn't explain it. Perhaps she'd been damned from the moment she saw him. Or perhaps she simply recognized that she had no other way to save Martha, inseperable from *him*, she guessed, as she was from Anubis. A system alarm jarred her out of her concentration. She flung herself into the CPU barely in time to see Martha settling her bike on a gossamer strand of webwork. The other woman looked tired, worn nearly to the bone, a trace of grey in her thick black hair. "Hello, Martha," said Jayhawk, sliding down a web-strand to perch near her. "Hello, Jayhawk. I can't stay long, I'm afraid." She touched the bike with an anxious gesture. "Is there something in particular you wanted to talk to me about?" Jayhawk licked her lips, plunged into it. "I had a talk with someone who lives at the relay station, and she suggested some questions that I could ask you." Not knowing the relationship between the two Marthas, she didn't know how to phrase things any better. "The relay station?" "A waterwheel in the middle of the jungle...." "Oh." Martha looked down through the meshwork supporting her, shoulders slumped. "I see." "One of the things she thought I should ask you--" Jayhawk dropped down lightly onto the level where Martha stood, spreading her arms a little for balance on the delicate fiber, though there was no chance she would fall, here. "What do you see when you look at me? Really look, with all the resources you can?" In short, clipped-off words: "Someone well on the way to losing her humanity." Stunned, Jayhawk whispered, "I think you're wrong. Why do you say that? What do you see that leads you to that?" "Someone completely sure of herself, no doubts, no hesitations. The Gatekeepers are like that--no qualms at all about what they do." Jay shook her head wildly. There were tears swimming in the corners of her eyes--she could have cancelled them, she controlled her image, but not without falsifying her expressions. She didn't want to do that. "I'm not like that at all--I've been stewing for hours over what to say to you--" She wanted to scream at Martha, to run up and shake her, and the effort to restrain that was going to make her do something really foolish. She hadn't cried since...she couldn't remember. "What do *you* see?" said Martha flatly. Taking that as an invitation, Jayhawk called up the analysis code she had so painfully crafted, probed into the image before her. Martha was...was something new, so foriegn to her experience that she had trouble interpreting the information she was getting. It could be analyzed later, but she needed insight *now*. There was something incomplete about Martha, something lacking. She remembered Piebald and Angela. There was no easy correspondence, only a feeling. Martha shifted uneasily under her gaze, said, "So you've been *there*. A long journey. Did you know where you were going?" "I've got no model of where that is in relation to anything else, but I did go where I intended to go, yes." "I'm not sure it has a meaningful relation to anything else." She frowned, puzzled. "How did you know where to go?" "I'd been there before." Martha's eyes widened perceptibly. "You had? When?" "When Aliantha sent me through the Gate. I was lost there, nearly dying, and the other Martha found me and fed me chicken soup." "You were there *before*? You're certain? Where did you think you were? Did you go there on purpose?" "No--I had no idea where I was; I thought it might be stimsense." "It may be, in a sense." As if to herself: "That's very strange. I had no idea that was possible. You're talented." "Does that upset some plan or other?" With a shaky smile through the lingering sting of tears, "I have the feeling I might run off the end of your plans any day now." "No, it's just very...odd." It seemed to Jayhawk that Martha was finally looking at her, perhaps actually seeing her for the first time. "I didn't tell you before because I didn't want to give the enemy any information. Name, rank, and serial number, that kind of thing." "Aliantha told us quite a bit more about you than that." "I know, but when you're in an impossible situation, every little thing helps." It surprised her that she didn't hate Martha for the terror of her captivity; but it didn't seem relevant, now. "So what did you talk about behind my back?" said Martha at last, a little less harshly. "A lot of things....She talked about the Black Path, and her opinion that it could never lead to anything but horror and corruption. Is that really what you see when you look at me?" "No," said Martha slowly. "Whatever else we may have done, we did manage to accomplish that." Jayhawk, who thought of the accomplishment as her own, bristled a little. "She was very bitter; she felt she'd pretty much given up. But she said you hadn't. I hoped...I hoped that I could show you some reason not to despair. I need your insight, your knowledge, if I'm going to do anything to help you." "What do you see when you look at me?" "Something that could be--could be very beautiful; but incomplete. Not whole." "Incomplete. Hmph. That's one I hadn't heard before." With sudden intensity: "Are you whole, Jayhawk?" She raised head, said proudly, "There's a lot I don't know, a lot of things I don't yet have the reach to accomplish; there always will be. But yes, I'm whole." "How?" Groping her way--she understood, but it was so hard to put into words-- "I shattered myself into different pieces, to escape what was being done to me; and I made alliances with others....After a while I realized that I couldn't bear to live like that anymore, and I--" She thought for a moment. "I sacrificed myself--those individual identities, what they represented--to be whole. Not to destroy them, but to end the split. A willing sacrifice, I think that's the only way it can be done--that's how Aliantha went wrong, or one of the ways. "I didn't understand, while I was like that, what I was really missing. Even before, when I--" She almost said *when I was human*, realized in time how that would sound. "Before I got involved in all this...there was so much I was lacking. Such a shallow existance by comparison. I don't know how to tell you how good things are for me right now. I hoped you could see." Defiantly, "I *prove* that it can be done, that you can walk the Black Path and come out whole." Her eyes were wet again. For a long moment Matha weighted that, eyes shadowed. "What did she tell you about me? Something pretty awful, I'd imagine." "She actually spoke very well of you: a good woman, she said. She was really down on herself, though. She told me that she'd given up, let herself get fat, that she was just waiting for the end." "Did she?....Hmph." Martha shifted uncomfortably, put one hand on her motorcycle as if looking for support. "What do you want, Jayhawk? I can't--I'm needed back there, things tend to fall apart when I'm away." Jayhawk took a deep breath, shivering inside at what she was going to say. "When I asked you what I'd have to do to help you, you said 'Heal him.' I'm going to try to do that. I need you to tell me as much as you can about his problem, your problem...our problem...." "And explain everything that's wrong in the world while I'm at it, I suppose?" "That will wait," said Jayhawk, not smiling. "First things first." Martha looked down through the thin lattice that supported her. "I don't know how much she told you--" "She explained your plans fairly well; but she didn't tell me what I need to know about *him*." "Jay--" There was real pain in her voice, beyond her usual reluctance. "I don't know--I don't know that there's anything you can do. I don't want to see you dragged down in this." "*What do you see when you look at me?*" Somehow it seemed to her that that was the critical question. Light flickered around Martha, responsive to her unspoken desire--a web of light, reaching out to hold her in place, though there was no power in it yet to do so. "Something fairly glorious," said Martha softly, staring into the light. "And I don't want to be the wicked stepmother who pulls her daughter into her plots and destroys her. I don't think you understand what I'm really like, or you wouldn't--" "If it helps, bear in mind that I've heard all this from *her* already. Can we consider it said? I'm not doing this because you manipulated me into it." She wished she were more sure of that. "Please, Martha. I'll go ahead whether you help me or not. Don't deny me the information that could make it work." In a choked voice--was she crying, too?--Martha said, "I'll write to you, and I'll tell you what I can. I owe you that much. But I *can't* *stay*--" With a sudden lunge forward, Jayhawk wrapped her arms around Martha. The other woman resisted for an instant, then embraced her tightly. She felt a dizzy, falling sensation, as if she were touching a powerful system into which she could dissolve, merge, if she let herself. *No! Not yet--* With an effort she held herself away, felt only the warmth of Martha's body, the trembling in her arms. Martha pulled away, almost fell onto her bike. One leg over the seat, hands tight on the handlebars-- She was gone. No power-surge of teleport, no trace of system access. "Magic," said Jayhawk aloud, softly, staring into empty space where Martha had been. She ached with something that was almost like loneliness, tears glittering in the corner of her eyes. With an effort, she remade her image, banished them. There was so much Martha could teach her; so little time. -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Article 56709 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!think.com!mips!cs.uoregon.edu!nntp.uoregon.edu!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (107) Message-ID: <1992Jan20.065013.1564@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 20 Jan 92 06:50:13 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 96 107. Letter Martha constructed a semblance of her workroom around herself and began the weary task of trying to put together a reply to Jayhawk. She felt like a fisherwoman, pulling up words and phrases out of the murkiest waters, looking at them and wishing she could throw them back. But she'd promised. Her arms still ached where she had held the girl. >Jayhawk, > I hope you're doing well. I will try to be straightforward and >concise in answering you. Our problems are as follows: >(1) We are party to a nearly immortal, highly magical entity who has had >his "body" hollowed out and then replaced with enough "wiring" to light >all of downtown Tokyo with. Said proceedure resulted in elevated levels >of discomfort which have not abated to this day. She shook her head at that, hearing an echo of a Martha who had once written documentation for accounting programs. So long ago.... >(2) The above entity was dissatisfied with the results of said proceedure >and is seeking a way to raise his level of comfort, both physically and >spiritually. Specifically to the latter, he seeks some manner of redress >with the original offending parties. >(3) Numerous attempts at more traditional means of comfort management >have not been able to address the above entity's concerns or problems >either physically or spiritually. Therefore, a fairly non-traditional >means of redress has been undertaken (though there are numerous >precedents in earlier ages for this means on the physical level). She read that over again, tsked at it, let it stand. Jayhawk probably knew as much of that ugliness as she needed to, already--at least she'd implied that she did. >(4) I don't know what you are truly capable of, don't tell me. Much though she would like to know....She wondered what she had been expected to see, and whether Jayhawk would take that tack with Him. >(5) You have approximately 10 days before the above non-traditional >procedure will be attempted. For a little while, she fished in clearer waters, almost recognizing the thoughts that came swimming up to her. The clarity ached too, but she was quietly grateful for it. She wasn't sure she'd been making any sense. >(6) I think that if you could fix the physical problems, the >mental/spiritual might follow (in any case you might be able to sway Him >enough not to seek immediate redress). >(7) Said entity's physical presence is immobile and nearly >indestructible in its current form, making any attempt at physically >dealing with the problem practically impossible. >(8) I think it's my body involved too (or at least what's left of it). >Seperation might be a good first step. It also might be a complete >fiasco, I'm most of His restraint now-a-days. Perhaps Jayhawk would kill her. She didn't think so, didn't think it was possible, but the idea had a dreary appeal. No. She was not done yet, not quite. With an effort she turned her thoughts from that well- worn path, bent again to her work. >(9) Due to proceedures already undertaken said entity is currently the >focus of a great deal of destructive potential on both the spirit and >the magical planes. Any plan of action must deal with these levels in a >thorough and conclusive manner. >(10) I'll append my access codes to matrix equivalents for all stations. >Don't trust them for too long, He's likely to change them when He finds >out. >(11) Said entity is determined to survive and "win". No other outcomes >are likely to be acceptable. She cast about, trying to find something else. What she'd already set down surprised her a little; both more and less than she had thought she could say, in some ways more than she'd ever known. Or perhaps she'd always known it...but it looked different face-to-face. >Us, >martha@paradisio.Him > >P.S. Good luck, I hope you can do something here... Did she really? Hope niggled at her, reopening old wounds. She was tired, drained by the effort of forcing the greyness into words. Tired and a little confused--even the words that were definitely hers didn't seem to say exactly what she'd meant, though she couldn't find any mistakes in them. She packaged the letter and consigned it to the Void, wings to carry it across. Darkness without end. She imagined death that way, and tried to forget the ghosts. -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Article 56711 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!think.com!mips!cs.uoregon.edu!nntp.uoregon.edu!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (108) Message-ID: <1992Jan20.065250.4543@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 20 Jan 92 06:52:50 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 128 108. Reasons Gregor watched his peculiar patient out of the corner of his eyes, mulling over what she had just told him. She had freed herself from the dragging pain-bond to Anubis, she assured him; she'd mastered the Gate. But she seemed more disturbed than triumphant. "What are you going to do now?" he ventured. She was silent for a long moment, locked in the still-photo pose he had come to associate with deep thought. "I am going to think very hard about what I'm doing. I need to know...if it's my decision to help *him*, or someone else's influence." "Does it matter?" She looked at him incredulously. "Of course it matters! If the reason I want to do it is that Paradisio wants me to do it--then I shouldn't. I am *not* a servant of his." "Why do you think you want to help him, then?" She shook her head, a cascade of bells. In a tense, clipped voice, she said, "It would be comforting to think that it was out of a desire for revenge--that simple death is not sufficient punishment for what he's done." "That isn't it." "No. That isn't it." She ground her fists into her forehead. As he had many times before, Gregor found himself wondering just how artificial those gestures were. "It would be simpler, though. As it is, I can't help but wonder if they--" "Well, how could you find out?" She said nothing, but words scrolled rapidly across the bottom of his screen: /I thought possibly you would have some idea. Silly me./ He'd never seen her do that before; he wondered what it was meant to imply. Not for the first time, he wished that Jones from the CompSci department would agree to monitor these conversations live, rather than simply looking at the tapes later. The computing idiom was still foreign to him. "What do you see as the possible reasons? Maybe I can help you decide among them." "It could be mind control. It could be something more subtle--if you know enough about someone, I imagine you can find ways to nudge them into doing things, just like a computer. It could be that....It could be that I'm just crazy. It could be that having seen *him*, experienced his pain, I....I don't know exactly. It doesn't make sense to me." "Do you have reason to believe that you might be under their control? I thought that the hawk you spoke to told you otherwise." Her eye widened a little, and she touched the faint red scar on her forehead. "It did. That's true. No direct control...." She shook her head. "That would be easier to understand too, if not to deal with." "Do you care what they think of you--Martha, the other Paradisians, the Dragon? It's natural to be concerned with the opinions of those you see as your peers." That had hit home, he suspected. "I care what happens to Martha," she said slowly. "I guess I do care what she thinks of me. I don't really understand that either, except that it seems like she's the only person alive who might be able to shed some light on what I am, what I've done. Aliantha's dead, and I destroyed her records. And...she was kind to me." She shook her head fiercely. "Not that that should matter, given the circumstances." "Do you see her as a victim of Paradisio, rather than an agent?" "They're all victims. Even *him*, if what she told me was true. But still--they've done so much harm, killed so many people, and worse--did I tell you about the ghoul-plague in Seattle? Why can't I be content to let them carry out their self-destruction?" In a whisper: "I could make it certain. I don't know if Martha can cross the Void. I can." "But you don't want to." "If he can't be healed, I *will* kill him. But...." She spoke softly, looking not at him, he thought, but at some private vision. "Being able to heal him, to know that I'd done it, would be so glorious." "That's why, then." Her eyes snapped back to him. "*That's* why? Self-aggrandizement, glory hunting?" "No," he said carefully, "that's not quite what I mean." "What do you mean, then?" Her tone was almost hostile. "I think you know, yourself; you're dodging around it, and it won't do any good for me to tell you, but you have the answer there. I don't think it's necessarily such a bad one either." She folded her arms, sat staring at him for a long minute. "It's the only way to save Martha, I think," she observed at last. "And that matters to me, God knows why. Am I in love with her?" "Are you?" He was pushing the edge of her tolerance, he suspected, but there was a sense of urgency about her, of terrible and irrevocable decisions about to be made, that seemed to him to justify such tactics. Jayhawk snorted. "It seems a little silly. When we were both human, we were both women." "Something else you have in common." She was still, mulling over that. He wondered if she were really still, or if she just stopped updating the picture. Perhaps it was a meaningless question. He still hadn't formed a clear conception of what her life must be like. And probably never would, he reflected. "Could you ask Dr. Marsh to talk to me next time? I have some questions for him about initiation, and spirit journeys." "I'll see if I can arrange that.--Have you decided?" Her image on the screen vanished, replaced by the email utility she had pre-empted; but he still heard her voice, whispering from the speakers. "Oh, I've decided. I only wish I understood why." -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Article 56710 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!think.com!mips!cs.uoregon.edu!nntp.uoregon.edu!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (109) Message-ID: <1992Jan20.065359.5912@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 20 Jan 92 06:53:59 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 95 109. Sword Curious about the new owners, and hoping to learn something from the Gate's programming if it hadn't been deleted, Jayhawk went back to Cavilard Base. The hedgerow SAN was still there, but alive now, supported by an active machine. Her sensors probed into its defenses until an image clicked suddenly into place. There was a tentacle woven into the hedge, long and sinuous. She frowned at it. Perhaps it was coincidence; but she had seen a similar tentacle all too recently, at Westking, attached to a construct that still made her shiver when she thought of it. She tried to slip through the hedge, felt the cold curl of a branching tendril she had missed settle on the back of her neck. Tasting her, it probed out into the telecom grid, seeking her source. She wasn't sure that it could find Anubis, but she wasn't sure it couldn't, either; she shook herself free, annihilated the tentacle with a cascade of disruptive code. The hedge looked thin without it. It had been much more extensive than she thought. She hesitated in the node, wondering if she could put together a fake tentacle quickly enough; but she hadn't even been able to see its full extent, which suggested that she wouldn't be able to copy it convincingly. She settled for quieting the node alarm, hoping that no one would respond. A heartbeat later she sensed motion, a decker headed her way. She hesitated on the edge of flight, wondering if she could hide from him. If he used code she understood-- The construct that entered the node looked like a flaming sword, gleaming and sharp, one of the most inhuman Matrix images she had ever seen. Its voice was male, fluent but faintly accented. "Who are you? What are you doing here?" Clearly he was having no trouble seeing her. "I'm Meg," Jayhawk said on impulse. "What are *you* doing here?" Was he Paradisian? The blade froze, a transmission flicking out from it toward the CPU. With a fraction of her attention she tapped it on the Overnet, though she didn't manage to keep it from going through. It said *Get down here! I've got a rogue G-prime loose!* Aloud, he said, "It's my system; why shouldn't I be here?" She thought she detected anxiety in his voice, though the sword image offered no clues. "It's *my* system," she said with a smile. "I'm just checking up to see how you're treating it." Might he mistake her for Aliantha? The idea amused her. "*Who are you*?" "I told you, I'm Meg. Who do you think I am?" "I think you're dead," he said in a voice somewhere between satisfaction and dismay. "Am I?" She laughed, trying to imitate the High Priestess' silvery voice. This was more fun than she'd expected. "What are you doing here?" There was a strange feeling in the machine around her, had been ever since she entered it; a quivering expectancy. The Gate was not open, but it was very close to opening, and the machine waited, tensely, for that moment. A message sped from the CPU to her questioner: *Coming!* "Why are you reopening my Gate?" she hazarded. "You're making the machine terribly nervous." "You can tell that?" He almost sounded impressed. "You can't?" She tsked in disapproval. "I want you to take good care of my system, see that it's not damaged. I don't mind you using it, but be sure you return it in good condition." It was hard not to giggle. This was as fun as trying to bluff Aliantha had been, and she was having *much* better luck. A ripple in the computer's processes reached her--CPU teleport! In the instant of transition she smiled brightly at the sword, stepped through into her garden. Balanced on the balls of her feet, lightblade in hand, she stood waiting for pursuit; but as she had expected, there was none. Martha had said that even she couldn't reach this place. Jayhawk felt fairly sure that no ordinary decker could; and the sword had been no more than that, though a talented one, from his speed and the clarity of his image. After a moment her laughter faded. Were they Paradisians? She thought so, from the sword's comment that she was dead. Probably they had mistaken her for Aliantha, guessing that 'Meg' was short for 'Megan'. Or perhaps they had known her as herself. In any case, she had better find out who was there and what they were up to. Duende and his allies might not trust her, but if she could tell them the numbers and disposition of Paradisians at Cavilard, she thought they might listen. -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Article 56713 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!think.com!mips!cs.uoregon.edu!nntp.uoregon.edu!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (110) Message-ID: <1992Jan20.065505.7188@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 20 Jan 92 06:55:05 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 308 110. Weasel Jayhawk went back to the Cavilard system with two thoughts in mind. She wanted to find out if its new occupants were really Paradisian; and if they intended to open a Gate, she wanted to see how they did it. Even her Void crossing had not taught her that. This time she got through the tentacle in the hedge undetected. The system felt just as it had before: tense, expectant, shivering with anticipation. Careful not to set foot on the bridge, she ghosted across the chasm which separated the Gate node from the rest of the system, crept cautiously up the conical mountainside. The flat top of the mountain bore new construction, a half-finished structure like the stub of a temple. A framework for IC, she guessed. Beside it, at the mountain's very center, was a huge, elaborate symbol-- a star in a circle, each line inscribed with complex patterns that reminded her of wiring diagrams. She could make no sense of them. She lingered there, probing into the node. It was very plain and bare, almost empty. The attendant datastore was completely vacant. No IC, no utilities, just a lot of power and the two constructs she could see. It was a little surprising. She'd expected a Gate to need more set-up than that. After an hour's interesting but unproductive analysis, she caught a flicker in the datastream: someone coming. She took a deep breath, steeling herself. She hadn't merged with a machine other than Anubis since her initiation, and she wasn't sure what it would be like. But the code was there, the capability was there, and she couldn't think of a better vantage on their Gate-making than within the supporting node. Always before, Kurt's program had broken down the walls between her and the machine--sometimes losing her in its impersonal activities, sometimes allowing her consciousness to guide and control. It wasn't like that now. She felt the Gate node, knew every aspect of its operations--but it was far smaller than she, and couldn't begin to contain her. Instead, her presence made it like a part of Anubis, a fragment of herself. She stretched, felt control slip into place--it was like riding a fine motorcycle, every nerve attuned to its balance and response, but retaining her own perspective to enjoy it. A good feeling. An instant later that was driven from her attention as people started to pour in. There were two deckers represented by figures in gray combat armor, helmets sealed; extending her senses, she could perceive links to the Overnet, capability beyond what she'd seen in most deckers. They were not like Martha, but they were powerful. Next came a huge creature, white-furred from head to toe, blue eyes like glacier ice. Then two more in gray, but ordinary deckers this time; one carried a small banner, a mailed fist grasping a horse-headed chesspiece. And then-- Herself? After a startled instant she saw the difference: no access to the Overnet, only the almost imperceptible link back to flesh and blood. But the likeness was exact. Herself as she had once seen herself, black-haired and armored in silver, light-blade at her side: her Matrix image, carefully designed so many years ago. She searched for discrepancies, found none. Six more deckers in grey, lances at their sides, completed the party. She felt a presence remaining in the CPU, wondered if it was the sword-like decker. The twelve took positions around the starred figure, evenly spaced. The one with the banner planted it solidly: a quick command, which she let go through, rooted its process in her. She was finding it hard to maintain a decker's normal vision while possessing the node in this way: its own perceptions were quite different. She tried to encompass both, realized she had better make recordings. She was too far from Anubis to rely on its storage, not without risking notice. She had an unused datastore here--why not? As the two armored figures who had entered first raised their arms, began to chant, she hastily wove together a simple recording utility, shunted it off to the datastore. She could understand nothing of what they were saying. The others responded occasionally in unison. The false Jayhawk was accurate down to the voice, down to a tendency to fidget between responses. Was it Angela? She wanted desperately to find out, perhaps to offer help--was the other a prisoner, helping Paradisio against her will? Or--could it really be *her*, a lost fragment of herself, now subject to them? A message reached her from the CPU, an odd, undefinable air of panic about it: *Cease recording, delete all records.* Her first impulse was to obey, as this node naturally obeyed--it was the CPU's right to command. She stifled that reaction with an effort of will. She was Jayhawk, and it was her right to override. She stopped recording-- clearly she was triggering some kind of telltale, and she didn't want them to come and investigate--and shuffled the records into compressed storage elsewhere in her datastore. Another message reached her: *Verify deletion.* It was hard to lie to the CPU, even harder than disobediance. She told herself firmly that she *had* deleted the information from those memory locations, and sent back the appropriate response. The group chanting seemed to reach an end; now only the two grey-armored leaders were speaking, alternating at intervals of a minute or so. One was a woman, from the voice. The language sounded vaguely like Spanish to her. Duende's native language had been, so he had said, a Portuguese-flavored Spanish. Or was it Latin, or something more arcane? Without access to a translation utility, she had no way to tell. The other Jayhawk fidgetted. Cradled in the node like a rigger in her vehicle, Jayhawk also felt the impulse, but restrained it. Surely something would happen soon. The node's expectancy prickled in her nerves, though she couldn't pin it down to anything explicit in its programming, its bare suite of utilities. An hour dragged by. She tried to think about her various projects, but it was difficult to pull her concentration away from the activities within her, meaningless though they were. And the other Jayhawk nagged at her. Who was she? How could she find out? It occured to her that the Paradisians--she was sure she was looking at the people Duende had asked her to research, Grey and his Grey Knights-- wouldn't want to interrupt what had already been a tediously long affair. She could speak to the other Jayhawk, sending her messages as the node would. The channels that carried status queries and handshaking could also be made to carry text. With luck, the other wouldn't dare do anything in response, afraid to break the ritual. *Don't make a fuss or you'll ruin everything. Careful!* The other Jayhawk jumped perceptibly, barely controlled herself. *Who are you?* *I'm Meg; who are you? What are you doing?* A message flicked out from her, toward the CPU--but through Jayhawk, who didn't even have to exert herself to intercept it. The headers were meaningless to her, but the message was in plaintext: *Help! She's talking to me! What do I do?* Jayhawk reversed the order of the address lines and appended a message to return to her: *Lead her on, find out what she wants.* The other Jayhawk considered that for a moment, shivering a little--Jay could feel her movements as the node reacted to them. The Matrix image was flawless. At last she responded: *I'm Jayhawk. What are you doing here? You aren't supposed to be here yet!* *I just wanted to talk to you, see what you're doing.* A few months ago, she would have reacted with scorn and anger to anyone else claiming to be her. Now she knew it was possible. *I'm surprised to find you here, working with them.* *Why shouldn't I be? They have something I want, they know what I want to know.* *I thought you were more independent than that. Didn't like working for the corps.* *I don't!* She looked around wildly, received no response from the others. *Careful, you'll screw up the ritual. Wouldn't want that, would you? Not when it's almost done.* *Hours yet.* *Why are you helping them?* *What is this, some kind of loyalty test?* *No, not at all. This is private between you and me. I wondered... whether you might be in trouble. Whether you might need help.* *Who the hell are you? You're not Aliantha! They would know! Why won't you tell me the truth?* *You're summoning Aliantha?* A shiver went through her, fear and excitement. *They are; I'm just support.--WHO ARE YOU?* *I don't think you'd believe me.* *Try me!* *I'm Jayhawk.* It was an impulse decision, and the response to it was equally impulsive; the other Jayhawk yelled out loud "Jayhawk's here!" Eyeless visors turned toward her, back to the center of their circle. She paled, her hands knotted together. *Shh! Stupid girl! I thought you had more guts than that.* She'd hoped that they would finish the summoning without realizing she was there; this person would probably warn them immediately afterwards, but she was quicker than human, and might turn the time to her advantage. That plan was certainly spoiled. *You're dead! How can you be talking to me?* *I'm not dead. Just different.* *You're dead. Go away. You're going to get me in trouble.* *Aren't you in trouble already? Didn't you once swear that you'd never work for them? Or are you not really Jayhawk?* *I'm Jayhawk. And I have a right to change my mind.* *What would Yoichi say? You're cooperating with the people who cut him open on an altar!* She wished she could transmit and receive voice, but she didn't have the bandwidth. She wanted to hear the other's voice, her reactions. Was it Angela? Working for them? She felt an aching sense of responsibility and protective love. *Yoichi sees it the same way I do. He's with us now too.* A moment's pause. *Where are you, anyway? How are you talking to me?* *You don't remember? How can you not remember that? It was your own innovation. Unless, of course, you're not really Jayhawk....* She firmly put aside the image of Yoichi in the hands of Paradisio. She'd spoken to him only days ago. She would have known. Wouldn't she? *I am Jayhawk!* *Then I can't be dead, can I? If I'm Jayhawk--* *I don't get it. Where are you?--Oh! The Kurt code! You're in the node!* Aloud: "Hey! She's in the node!" The male ritualist raised one hand in a sharp silencing gesture, returned to his chant without missing a beat. *Shh! Don't you want the summoning to work?* *No; I don't particularly want to see her. Ghosts, you're all ghosts. Go away.* *Not even curious about who I am, what it's like?* She found herself hoping that this was not a stray fragment of herself. What would it take to kill her curiosity? *You faked that message, didn't you! Admit it! Trying to get me to tell you something--but it won't work.* She crossed her arms defiantly across her chest, stared into the circle. Nothing Jayhawk could say got a reaction. Frustrated, she considered her options. It might be herself, terribly bound and diminished. It might be Angela, though that didn't quite ring true either. It might be someone else, perhaps running off the stimsense tapes that Angela had experienced. Jayhawk couldn't tell from her conversation. It occured to her suddenly that she could get the information directly, accessing the other decker as if she were a datastore. 'I could just take it from you,' Aliantha had said to her long ago. 'You're not defended against me.' *She* could do that now. Cruel, as cruel as Channa's mindreading; but she had to know. If it were herself, if it were Angela....She reached out, made the access. It was surprisingly easy from here. The chanting was cut across by a terrible scream: "She's in my MIND!" A stream of profanity, words Jayhawk didn't even recognize. "I didn't sign up for this!" And the link she had forced was wrenched by the sudden static of jack-out as the other Jayhawk vanished. At the center of the circle, something laughed, a silvery familiar sound. Jayhawk tried to prevent the escape, but too late. The node around her shivered as the ritual fell apart, barely-sensed lines of force snapping like thread. The male ritualist staggered, caught himself with his lance. Beside him, the white-furred creature let out a roar, reached out-- Jayhawk threw herself into CPU emulation, against violent opposition both from within and from the CPU, and teleported herself to the outer SAN. She didn't want to return to the garden yet. There was still a trace of contact. She probed along it--and it was broken with violence that sent a stab of pain through her. The system shrilled with alarms. With a cry of frustration, she sent herself into the sudden silence and tranquillity of her gardens. When she was sure that there would be no pursuit, she considered what she had learned. It was almost as if each aspect of herself had taken that instant to ask a single question, receive the briefest answer. Jayhawk had asked: Who are you? And the answer had been *Weasel*. Caroline had asked: Do you believe that you are Jayhawk? And the answer had been *No*. Angela, on a more personal level: Do you want to be Jayhawk? And again the answer had been *No*. And Piebald, odd man out as always: *What do you think of me?* And the answer had been terror, stark and absolute. Weasel had felt the probe, and it spoke to her worst fears. She was angry--at Weasel, at the Paradisians, at...she wasn't sure. She had wanted to be able to offer help, she realized. She wanted badly to touch someone, to make a difference in their life. Weasel had scorned her help--had never wanted it, probably, was no doubt a Paradisian agent. But somehow she felt jilted. What on earth had they been doing? Why masquerade as her? The answer seemed clear as soon as the question was posed: They had been trying to fool Aliantha. They wanted something from the shade of the High Priestess, something they thought that her image could evoke. -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Article 56712 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!think.com!mips!cs.uoregon.edu!nntp.uoregon.edu!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (111) Message-ID: <1992Jan20.065607.8460@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 20 Jan 92 06:56:07 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 234 111. Summoning Jayhawk found a nearly-unused machine in the Architecture Department, probably bought for a need that had never materialized, and used it as a base for her programming. The tools she needed were at hand, though it was odd to be working in such a cold, empty place. But she felt that what she was doing shouldn't be done in Anubis. She was making an image of Aliantha as she had seen her in the gardens: a small, graceful woman with wavy brown hair framing a heart-shaped face, dressed in a grey jogging suit with pink stripes down the sides. Under that appearance was decking code--she'd taken the core of it from the programming of her own Matrix image, though carefully stripped of anything specific to herself. Matrix images were normally tuned to the user, and hers was extremely fine-tuned. She undid all that, setting each parameter at the default a factory-built deck might use. She was trying to create something with the limitations of a decker--no more access to the Matrix or the Overnet than standard code would allow. It occured to her as she worked that she'd need to anchor the image somewhere, as a decker was linked back to deck and body. She puzzled over that for some time. To another machine? She imagined Aliantha laughing at her and slipping off into the Matrix along the link. To the ghost of the Hidden Fortress itself? But that would be sustained by Anubis; a link leading back to *her*. Off into nothingness? That idea made her obscurely uncomfortable. When the image was nearly finished, her discomfort crystallized into action. She went to the hedge maze that surrounded her islands, stood with hands on hips looking around at it. As a maze it wasn't much; it echoed the structure of Anubis, which was not designed to lose intruders. She recalled the peacock who had spoken to her during her initiation, how it had first appeared as a shifting feathered wall. An hour's work established that she could make such walls herself, sliding at her command across open passageways, channeling intrusion where she pleased. In the course of her work she kept an eye out for the black crow feather she'd abandoned here, and eventually found it, bedraggled but intact, caught in a bush. She wove it into the final barrier. The crow had confused her; perhaps its token would confuse others. Or was she just giving it a way in? She thought about that for a while without coming to any conclusions; but she left the feather where it was. Returning to the Matrix, she finished her image. It was almost a convincing decker, complete in everything but life and will. Compressing its code into storage, she went off to resurrect the Hidden Fortress. Grey and his allies had needed hours of ritual to call up Aliantha...but it seemed to her that they'd been in the wrong place. The High Priestess hadn't died at Cavilard. There was not even a trace of connection left at the telecom node which had led to the Hidden Fortress. Jayhawk sat down in the emptiness, closed her eyes and dug through memory. She had known that machine, known it intimately. Slowly images and shadows built around her, called from someplace inside that she hadn't known she could reach. The Hidden Fortress was dead, but it lingered--not on the Matrix, not any longer, that route was closed. In her. While she lived, it would never be totally gone. An errant thought: If I loved a man and he died, would he become a ghost? She opened her eyes to see the shadow of the SAN wavering before her. Within it was only greyness. Walking into it, she called on Anubis' power to give it strength, solidity. She was almost emulating the machine from scratch. Only the faint response from something that was not Anubis told her otherwise. Ghosts and memories were providing perhaps one percent of what she was making; but without that one percent, it seemed to her that her plan would fail. There was a moment of disconnection, dismay: the Matrix address of this machine had been reassigned to another, and it was encountering opposition. She told it a quick lie, revising its address, and the node steadied around her. She recreated the five nodes that spanned from SAN to CPU, but not the CPU itself, remembering how it had pulled at her, trying to save itself. She didn't want to give Aliantha such an ally. The system had a peculiar unreality without its CPU, but she hoped that it would be enough. In the routing node where she had first met Aliantha, she set up the image, linked it out through an I/O port. She was giving it access to Anubis, potentially, but she would have to trust to her defenses. It stood empty-eyed and lifeless, though she could feel its processes as an infinitesimal load on Anubis, motion if not life. She had met the High Priestess three times. Once here, on the Matrix. Once a voice out of dead storage and memory, in the island-garden. And once in nightmare, memory of her first kidnapping, still blocked from consciousness except in dreams. She searched for the common thread that united all three images, said softly aloud into the empty node "Megan...." It was not the name she had intended to use, but it felt right. Something stirred among the memories, like a soft breeze against her skin, a chill caress. She saw the fragility of the virtual system she was inhabiting, saw dimly through its walls into the greyness. Felt a presence, suddenly and sharply, then another--the inhabitants of her dreams, she who had built walls around her mind, he who had lent her strength. She felt their fear at the sudden realization of an intruder's presence. Something whispered by her, like a dark cloud across the night sky, heading for the non-existant CPU. *This is past! I summon you now, in the present!* She followed it, lending the ghost-node ahead enough solidity to support her presence. The empty eyes of the image were on her back. Darkness lay gashed across the inside of the CPU like a tear in the fabric of the world. For a brief instant she saw herself, hanging pinioned against the darkness; then it pulled the mirror-Jayhawk through. Saw the glass tank that had held Aliantha braced before the swiftly-closing opening; and a swarm of black flies descending upon it as all around them the system shattered. All semblance of the CPU vanished, though somewhere outside she could still feel the ghost system, held in tenuous stability by Anubis desite damage that should have obliterated it utterly. Around her she could see only roiling greyness. Not the Overnet...darker, and more alive. Glass shattered, somewhere behind her. She turned, saw the image she had made walking toward her in a curl of cinnamon smoke. Its eyes were far more dead than they had been when it was uninhabited, and did not blink. Though there was some kind of floor below her, she found that she wasn't standing on it, but hovering in the grey as if flying, one leg crossed behind the other knee. In that posture she was looking down slightly on the image of Aliantha. It was a small comfort. She licked her lips, said carefully, "By what name would you choose to be called?" In a still, toneless voice, the image replied, "By what name would you choose to call me?" *Was* it Aliantha or Megan? Suddenly she wasn't sure it was either. "By the name you had when you still hoped." "Call me as you choose. Does it matter?" She considered that for a moment. "It does to me. I would like to know who answers." "You have questions of importance to ask me, and that is not one of them." Jayhawk raised her head, said formally, "I have four questions for you, of which that is one." With a smile that came nowhere near the coldness of its eyes, the image replied, "But you only get three." Though she tried not to show it, she was relieved to get even three. She had spent a good deal of time considering ways to bribe or coerce or trick Aliantha into telling her what she wanted to know; but none of her plans had seemed entirely convincing. She licked her lips again, said: "For what purpose--" She had learned her lesson about asking 'why?' "For what purpose was I chosen and taken?" "Is that one?" "That is one," she said tightly. The smile widened infinitesimally, showing a gleam of teeth. "For understanding, for knowledge, to transform an enemy into a friend." A deliberate pause. "*She* had no clear intentions. She hoped that you could do something she lacked the strength and cleverness to do, attempt something she was no longer free to attempt." Not Aliantha. Suddenly the image of black flies clicked together with memory, an echo out of nightmare. She was speaking to Marianne, the Queen of the Ghouls; or something of hers. And to the creature that had attacked her on the slopes of Cavilard Gate, probed into her with a ghoul's three-fingered hand. She had almost blotted that encounter out of her mind, put it down simply as a Gate guardian. It was more than that. She remembered the mind-links that Ratty had described, binding Marianne to each of her victims, into death and beyond. Had she somehow gotten at Aliantha too? "What task did Aliantha wish me to accomplish?" "She was not sure. Perhaps a new leader. Perhaps a powerful agent. Perhaps something more." Her suspicions confirmed: "What did she know about *him*?" And cursed herself. It was a Paradisian habit not to mention *his* name, though she knew it; Duende had told her. "A great creature, immortal, powerful, writhing on a rack of steel and glass, mad with pain. She hoped to heal him, and she failed. He hopes to heal himself, and he will fail; he will die." More softly, a whisper like wind in an empty place: "And that must not be." It was almost Aliantha's voice. "He will die, and the magic will end. And that must not be." Not Aliantha's voice at all, though there was passion in it. Jayhawk dropped lightly to the unseen floor, so that she was on a level with the image. "Wait," it whispered. "There is more. Will you bargain for it?" "Do I need to bargain with you?" "Do you? You are strong; perhaps you can accomplish something, ignorant as you are. She was strong too, in her way." She reached out, trying to decide whether she had any control over her summoning, any way to compel it to speech. As far as she could tell, she didn't. "What bargain do you offer?" "Your aid, for the city, for us." "What do you want me to do?" "We do not know yet. Only your word that when we ask, you will come, you will help us. Once only." She considered that, biting her lip. "No. I'm sorry. I cannot." "Humans say that all the time," said the image simply. "It means nothing." It turned and walked away into the fog. Hastily she reached out, unknit the programming that held her creation together. It melted into the surrounding mist, chilling the air. She released her hold on the Hidden Fortress, felt the machine collapse back into nothingness, no existance except in her memory. She was alone in a foggy place, nowhere she knew. She probed into the fog, trying to orient herself. Partly on the Matrix, partly on the Overnet, partly...elsewhere....She felt as if she was spread out, vulnerable from more directions than she had known existed. With a shiver, she pulled herself together, stood in evening sunlight in the island-garden, her walls solid around her. -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Article 57418 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!ccu.umanitoba.ca!access.usask.ca!alberta!ubc-cs!uw-beaver!zephyr.ens.tek.com!uunet!ogicse!henson!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (112) Message-ID: <1992Jan28.031420.27988@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 28 Jan 92 03:14:20 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 153 112. Stranger Channa settled herself on the folded-out cot at the back of the van, next to the unconscious girl, and looked up at Yoichi. He was hovering over her, eyes tense. With an effort, she dismissed him from her thoughts. A word, a gesture to focus the gift, reach out-- A babble of incomprehensible vision and sound exploded in her mind, shattering the delicate pattern of her spell, snapping the link. She recoiled, trying frantically to defend herself from an intrusion that was already over by the time she could respond to it. "What--?" began Yoichi, then caught himself and was silent. Trying to make sense out of what she'd touched, Channa managed to pull together an image of the room where Casey had found the young woman--she couldn't think of her as Jayhawk, despite the striking resemblance. But the rest of the information that had come bubbling across the link was gibberish, masses of numbers and symbols that meant nothing to her. It was even worse than the time she'd touched Jayhawk's mind when she was still enmeshed in the thoughts of the computer; here there was no human processing or imagery at all. Already the information was fading, impossible to organize. She wondered if Yoichi could have understood it. "I touched something that felt more like a machine than a person," she said to him. He nodded sharply, said nothing, though she could feel the pressure of his desperation as clearly as if he'd shouted it aloud. Every night for the past week she'd tasted Yoichi's dreams muddled into her own, her gift running wild from exhaustion and stress. That memory drove her to try the probe again, against her best instincts. He needed to know. She brushed the machine-thoughts, like a surface of reflective silver, managed not to break the surface and bring that chaos swarming back into her mind. Underneath, deep under and quiet with the drug's effects, she touched something more human. A young woman sleeping. *Who are you?* She followed that question to its answer, a name, an image. Angela Whitechapel. Nobody special, just another freshman struggling through her classes, bored with life. Eighteen years old. Channa probed deeper, could find no memory of capture or imprisonment. *What cyberware do you have?* Only a datajack, the girl recalled. Her father--Channa had a brief image of a corporate stuffed-shirt, neither loved nor particularly hated--hadn't wanted her to have cyberware yet. Maybe when she graduated. "Yoichi," she said softly. "Look up 'Angela Dolores Whitechapel' in the public database." He almost flung himself into the front seat of the RV; she couldn't hear typing, and guessed he was using the direct link through his deck. She let her contact with Angela relax, but didn't drop it; she might have further questions. "Got it," said Yoichi after a moment, in the toneless voice of someone still focusing most of his attention into the otherworld of the Matrix. "Kidnapped from a play on May 23; there was a police investigation which is now closed. Her parents are offering--" He checked for an instant. "A million nuyen reward for information leading to her safe recovery." "A *million*? Good grief, whose daughter is she?" Angela's memories of her father were of a top-level executive, more devoted to his job than his family, well-off but hardly a millionaire. Were those memories false, or did her father have connections she'd never known about? Never even suspected? "Richard Aaron Whitechapel, vice-president, CC Corporation. A bigwig, but not that big, if this entry's for real. Maybe he's Yak." "Maybe this isn't really her.--Check the results from Grant's medscan. That ought to tell you if she's really Angela." "Matches," said Yoichi after a moment. "Let me look at Jayhawk's records." She looked up, saw him huddled around his deck in an almost fetal position, eyes closed, face blank. "Not a match. Real close, though. Too close for random people, if I'm using this package right. I don't know anything about biomed." Channa frowned, puzzled--and in the instant of her distraction the inhuman presence she'd touched before probed out at her, filled her mind with harsh, meaningless bits of data. She broke the link reflexively, both hands making groping warding gestures toward the girl. "What *is* that?" she whispered. "I don't think the reward is for Angela. There's something else in there." "You shouldn't be trying to use magic to identify code," said Yoichi. "That's my job." He got up abruptly, began disconnecting the RV computer from its antenna coupling. "Let me take this off-line, and I can run some tests. I don't think this program should be able to do much without a Matrix link." "Unless it's Paradisian." "Do we have any reason to think so? Other than that she looks like Jayhawk?" He shook his head. "I don't know. But we need to find out--unless you want to just turn her in for the reward." His tone said clearly that he did not. Channa sat back, watching him make his preparations. His movements were sharp, anxious, full of suppressed violence. But he touched the sleeping girl gently, hardly disturbed her as he connected the dataline. He'd turned the screen to face her; in the instant of connection it filled with small, square windows on a greenish background, text scrolling through each one faster than she could follow. One by one they closed like eyes, until there was only a single block of text in the middle of a blank green screen. It cleared, one sentence visible. /Group identification, query? Yoichi hestitated, then typed rapidly. She couldn't make out what he said, but the final window-eye closed, leaving the screen blank. His fingers rattled on the keyboard for a moment more, were still. With infinite care he leaned forward, disconnected the dataline. "No luck?" she said. He looked up suddenly, as if startled by her voice. "What? No, I can't get in directly, but I had a trap on it--lots of stuff there to analyze. Give me a few hours." He curled up in the front seat, reconnected his deck. "You should get some sleep." "Later. You don't need me anyway--what do I know about planning a military strike? This is my end here." Channa wriggled under the girl's blanket, pillowed her head on her arms. She wanted to keep an eye on Angela, on Yoichi, but she was too tired. Her presence would have to substitute for her attention. Dawn woke her, filtering in through the curtains of the RV. Yoichi was asleep in the front seat, his deck tucked in beside him. There was a message on the console screen, white on black: her name caught her eye, and she bent to read it. >Channa-- >The program we saw was high-spec analysis routine, not commercial. Has >Ren'raku stamps and internal validation. Probably experimental. >That's all I could get. Wake me if she wakes up. Yoichi She shook her head, remembering the alien presence. Ren'raku experimental cyberware and programming. She didn't envy Angela that awakening. For a moment Channa was gripped with a weary, hopeless anger. It wasn't even Paradisio's doing. Just another of the world's random cruelties....They might win one fight, though she was finding that harder and harder to believe. But Angela was a bitter reminder that even defeating Paradisio would never her let go back to the remembered decency of her youth. It had been an illusion, she saw that now. She missed it desperately. -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Article 57419 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!ccu.umanitoba.ca!access.usask.ca!alberta!ubc-cs!uw-beaver!zephyr.ens.tek.com!uunet!ogicse!henson!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (113) Message-ID: <1992Jan28.031557.28354@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 28 Jan 92 03:15:57 GMT Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 150 113. Marsh Gregor sat behind his desk, half a tuna sandwich forgotten in front of him, and watched his colleague Marsh argue with Jayhawk. She had asked him about shamanic initiation--what it was, how it was accomplished, what it meant--and he didn't want to answer her without knowing the reason behind the question. "I have to guide someone else through it." Marsh pulled at his moustache. "Isn't that rather arrogant? Most of the traditions I'm familiar with insist that initiation is only accomplished by the one initiated." "Maybe that's not the right word, then. I don't know. Maybe 'rebirth' would be better." "What makes you think you have the right to do such a thing?" Gregor, looking at the set of Marsh's shoulders from behind, felt his own nerves prickle. The sorceror was angry, or afraid. He'd been working with Marsh for three years, and he'd only seen him that upset twice. Neither was a pleasant memory. "I think I'm the only one who can," said Jayhawk with dangerous softness, "and it needs doing. I hoped you could help." "I'm reluctant to tell you anything," said Marsh, just as softly, just as dangerously, "until I know just what you think is going on. A matter of trust." Jayhawk was silent, motionless--thinking, he'd come to realize; thinking so hard that she didn't bother to update her image on the screen. "Paradisio is going to destroy itself in a very ugly fashion," she said at last. "Either I help them, make *sure* they die, or I try to find another way." "Destroy itself? How?" In level, clipped tones: "There is a multinational operation called Project Sunflower, a set of unmanned satellites which can project a field blocking out magic. They intend to use that to destroy *his* magical defenses, and then follow with the deathblow--a fusion explosion, probably." "And you think they'll use this power to *destroy* themselves? Have you reported this to the authorities?" She shook her head. "I don't think that would do any good. And yes, I believe Martha when she says she'll try to destroy them, though I'm not sure she'll succeed. Maybe I should do it myself. I know I can." Marsh leaned foward in his chair, almost touching the screen. "You're one of them, then." "No!" Gregor tensed, waiting for the explosion, as Marsh plowed forward: "You're just as guilty in what they do as the man who leaves a loaded gun in the hands of terrorists. You may not have the blood on your own hands, but you have the power to stop it--how can you live with that?" "I don't want to stop them from being destroyed," said Jayhawk very softly. "I want them to be destroyed. I'll do it myself if I have to." "You've bought into their lies--why on earth would anyone gain power like that and use it for self-destruction?" "I know Martha. I believe her when she says that's what she wants." "That's one person. What about everyone else in the organization?" "As far as I know, there are only two living people who can do this. Sunflower's well protected. One of them is Martha, and the other is me. Aliantha perhaps, but she's dead." "As far as you know. Is that good enough?" His tone was almost insulting. *Careful!* Gregor wanted to say, but he didn't dare. "It's going to have to be. I'm the one in position to decide." With sudden fury: "What the hell do you want me to do?" "Report it! Get the authorities in on this! Stop trying to play Lone Ranger! Or give me the information, and I'll do it." "I have a friend in Interpol. I don't want to see him die. And that's about all reporting this is going to accomplish. The authorities are not in a position to deal with Paradisio. They just don't have the resources." "And you do." Openly insulting now. "You're willing to take responsibility for all the deaths--" Bells chimed dissonantly as Jayhawk shook her head wildly. "I haven't killed anyone! Dammit, I came to you asking for help in preventing this!" She took a deep breath: her eyes searched out Gregor, sitting pale and tense behind his desk. "Which I see that I'm not going to get. Your decision." The screen went blank, and the small panel of lights behind it died. "Good God, she's killed your machine," said Marsh, drawing back. He turned, met Gregor's eyes with an expression somewhere between fury and sheepishness. "I'm sorry," he said, with a toss of his head toward the terminal. "It won't be broken," said Gregor slowly, reaching for calmness. "She wouldn't damage a machine to make a point." Marsh reached out, stabbed a button viciously. The screen flared to life in a start-up pattern. He snorted, turned back to Gregor. "What are you going to do now?" "Apologize." Marsh sighed. "Up to you, I suppose. I imagine she'll refuse to talk to me anymore--" "I agree." "I only hope I got something through." His voice was defiantly loud. "I don't understand--" "I know," said Gregor wearily. "We've argued this before. You don't understand why I treat her as I do, and I don't understand her well enough to gamble on anything harsher. I only hope you got through what you intended." *I don't think so,* he wanted to add, but innate diplomacy kept him from it. Marsh was not fooled. "You think I was wrong to do that." Gregor picked up the neglected sandwich, stared at it wearily. In a kinder voice, Marsh said, "I'm sorry, Gregor. You can tell her I said so, if it helps." By the next morning he had a reply to his carefully composed apology: the only response, he suspected, he was ever going to see. >Dr. McDougall, > >You can tell Dr. Marsh that I've notified Interpol, as he suggested. >I hope he enjoys the consequences; I think he should keep careful track >of them. > >Perhaps when all this is over we'll have an opportunity to talk. >Until then, best wishes. I don't think I'll be able to see you again. > >Jayhawk -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Article 57645 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!wupost!uunet!ogicse!henson!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (114) Message-ID: <1992Jan31.040648.11849@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 31 Jan 92 04:06:48 GMT Article-I.D.: milton.1992Jan31.040648.11849 Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 151 114. Journey Jayhawk slept briefly among the feathers, dreamed of the Dragon. When she woke, she bathed in the pools, remembering something she'd read about preparing oneself for magic. The water didn't cling to the bright garment of her life-thread, but her hair was full of glittering droplets. She rose into the air, shook herself until they scattered like raindrops, and tried to choose a direction. She was resolved to find the Hawk who had aided her own initiation, and ask it to teach her how to heal the Dragon. It seemed to her that she remembered where the great tree had been, but fifteen minutes' flight did nothing to bring it in sight. Then she saw a dark speck, also flying, approaching. For a moment she thought she'd found the Hawk, sooner and more easily than she'd expected; but this was a larger and uglier bird, bare-headed and with a long hooked beak. It bent its flight to circle her, regarding her with a pale yellow eye. "By what right?" it said suddenly, in the voice of a querulous old man. Jayhawk hovered, one foot behind the other knee, and considered that. The bird circled her at a distance--it didn't look like a very manuverable flyer. It was not an easy question. She had almost formulated a good answer when it said harshly, "By no right, then," and began to accelerate. "What I'm doing needs to be done," she said to it, "and it seems as if I'm the one who's in a position to do it. That's my right." It made no reply, continuing to accelerate. It was almost a blur around her. She spread her arms, preparing to dive under and out-- Something hit her with bone-jarring force, knocked her out of the sky. She hit water, hard, then something harder beneath the water. Struggling and sputtering, she thrashed upwards to the surface. She was in the deepest pool of the island-gardens, nowhere near where she had been. Rising into the air, she shook furiously, water spraying in all directions. She hadn't been harmed in any way, as far as she could tell. Just sent back, rudely and emphatically. Apparently the bird hadn't liked her answer. She flew in the same direction, but much lower to the trees. The bird hadn't seemed very agile; she doubted it could pull that trick again if she flew within the thick canopy. But there was no sign of it, no sign of the great tree and its nest, nothing to break the monotony of the treetops. After half an hour, she landed, walked on intead. Perhaps the trees were hiding something from her. In any case, it was pleasantly cool under the feathery trees, and she enjoyed her feeling of security in a place which would once have terrified her. A flicker of black ahead drew her attention. She ran toward it, spotted a familiar black bird perched on a branch several meters overhead. "Cark!" it said conversationally. "Hoi, small, dark and tricky!" Matrix-trained, she found nothing particularly surprising about talking birds. "Do you know where I can find the Hawk?" "Cark! Why would you want to find the Hawk? That looks like it was painful. Want another?" Her hand went automatically to the scar on her forehead, though it wasn't sore at all, hadn't been since her physical death. "No, to be honest. But if that's what it takes--" It settled itself, preening one wing. "I know how to find the Hawk. I know a lot. Why should I tell you? Do you have something for me?" It was eyeing her garment, spun of the thread of her own life. "Not that," said Jayhawk immediately. She patted her belt pouch, came up with a small, heart-shaped flask. It had been abandoned on top of the Red Tower at Cavilard. The power it contained intruigued her, but she was afraid to use it. "What do you think? Isn't it pretty?" The flask glittered like ruby in the light, though she suspected that its color came from the liquid within. "Hm, pretty!" It turned its head on one side, admiring the flask. "Give it to me, and I'll tell you how to find the Hawk." "Tell me how to find the Hawk, and I'll give it to you. Come on, I'm honest." It gave out a harsh, cawing snort. "Too small, anyway. Want a *real* pretty. Bet you don't have one though." "I've seen the most beautiful thing in the world," said Jayhawk softly. "What? What?" "The Dragon at Paradisio." "That? That's not pretty!" "It all depends in how you look." The bird's head disappeared for a moment, leaving its body sitting truncated on the branch. It reappeared as abruptly, feathers in disarray. "*That's not pretty!*" It fluttered upwards, toward the open sky; hastily she followed it. No matter how fast she flew, it kept a constant three meters above. "There's still this--" She turned the bottle so it flashed in the sun. "Cheapskate," it said morosely. "Why should I tell you how to get there? Bothersome human, always poking in where she's not wanted." "Come on," she coaxed. "How else can you prove how wise you are? I came all this way to hear your advice, since it was so good last time." "Was it?" It let out a small caw, drifted a little lower, but still well out of reach. "Cark! You don't have anything nice for me, you pulled my tail, why should I do you any favors?" "Oh-ho!" she said, struck by a sudden idea. "I see! You don't know how to find the Hawk at all! You're just leading me on, trying to waste my time and take my pretties. What a cheat! What a cheapskate!" "I do know! I am not!" "Prove it!" With a sudden lunge it dove downward--she tensed, thinking it would strike her, but it dove past, toward the tree canopy. She plunged after it, afraid to lose it. With a raucous caw of anger, it veered abruptly, and she saw a flicker in the air before it. She veered too, saw the bird vanish into nothingness, saw the opening flicker out of existance inches away-- WHUMP! as she hit the treetops with staggering force, went crashing and plunging through the branches. They felt none too feathery, poking and plucking at her body. A last, bruising bounce off of a wide limb, and she hit water with a tremendous splash. A moment later her head poked up above the surface; she caught her breath, laughing. She was in the pools of the island-garden, of course. But it had been a good try--workable, she sensed, if only she'd been a little quicker. And the bruises would fade, were fading already, repaired by the system that supported her. It felt good. -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Article 57646 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!wupost!uunet!ogicse!henson!milton!phylo!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@phylo.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (115) Message-ID: <1992Jan31.040750.12134@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 31 Jan 92 04:07:50 GMT Article-I.D.: milton.1992Jan31.040750.12134 Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Reply-To: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 139 115. Hummingbird When she'd recovered from the bruising fall, Jayhawk set out once more, looking for the great tree and the Hawk. Nothing challenged her right to fly where she pleased, but she found nothing; eventually she landed and walked, hoping that that would be more productive. She was a little less amused, now. She wondered how much time was passing outside. It had been the eighteenth of June when she came here. Midsummer was the twenty-first. A flash of bright color ahead caught her eye. She crept up on it, spotted a tiny jewel-like bird hovering among the feathery leaves. Its wings made a faint whirring hum. "Hoi, bird," she said to it. "Hi!" it chirruped back, in a voice like the ring of metal on glass. "Do you know where to find the Hawk?" "Yep!" It buzzed towards her, circled her head, just out of reach. "Where?" "Nope!" "Please? Pretty please?" "Nope!" She folded her arms across her chest, glared at it. "Why not? Are you afraid of it?" "Nup!" Had she heard that right? "Nup? What do you mean?" "Yope!" She was beginning to get annoyed. "Hey, bird. I'll let you taste something nice if you'll tell me where to find the Hawk." It had a long, needle-like beak; she vaguely remembered seeing a picture of such a bird drinking from a flower. She took out the heart-shaped bottle, unstoppered it. The bird darted closer, hovered. She'd never seen a real bird fly like that. "Yup! Yup!" "Will you show me how to get to the Hawk?" "Yup!" It hovered by her hand, dipped its beak into the bottle. She watched it with tight lips, snatched the bottle away as its level began to dwindle. "Now show me." She was resolved that if the little bird didn't keep its word, it would end up stowed in the belt pouch, to be given to her next questioner. It darted away, up and into a heavy mass of foliage. She threw herself after it, dove into an impenetrable screen of leaves--hit water, then something hard beneath the water, and scrabbled up sputtering and coughing in fury. She looked around wildly for the bird, hanging dripping in the air with her lightblade hissing and sparking in her hand. Only then did she realize, more through feel than her blurry vision, that she was not back at the island-garden, not in Anubis. Pillars of stone rose around her, carved with birds of all kinds. Behind her loomed an enormous tree, leafless but strong, with a great nest visible at its very top, hundreds of feet above. She was hovering above a shallow, mossy pool which she didn't recall having seen before--she reflected wryly that it might have helped break her fall, had it been there on her previous visit. She shook herself free of water, rose upward. On that previous visit, the nest had been above her flight ceiling, out of reach. She was pleased to discover that she had apparently improved, though it was still near her limit. There was nothing inside, neither Hawk nor egg. She circled, looking out over the forest. No breaks were apparent in the dense canopy. Something bothered her about the scene; she was still trying to put a finger on it when a soft "Cark!" from behind startled her. She whirled in midair, saw a familiar-looking black bird perched on the edge of the nest. "Cark yourself!" she snapped back, then thought better of it. "Hello, bird. Glad to see you got here." In a voice totally unlike the one she remembered, slow and thoughtful and vaguely drawled, the bird said: "Why are you here?" She landed on the edge of the nest, balancing carefully. Something in its bearing suggested that it should be taken seriously, though she wondered if her small, dark antagonist was playing a trick on her. "I'm trying to find the Hawk." "Why?" "I want to ask it some questions. It helped me before, and I hoped it might be able to do it again." "By what right do you come here?" It turned its head sideways, listening to her intently. She licked her lips, said carefully, "I'm doing something that I think needs to be done, and I seem to be the one who has to do it. By the right of necessity." It regarded her in silence for a moment. "Why wings?" She guessed that that meant *Why can you fly?* "For speed; to overcome obstacles and see a long way; to show my freedom." "Do you seek more of those things?" "No. I don't need any further power or freedom for myself. I have what I need. I'm looking for advice; that's all." It nodded, apparently approving. "When you come before the Hawk, remember this: the Hawk sees all who are not hawks as predators or prey." She nodded, silently resolving: *Not me.* "How do I find it?" "You may begin from here. I cannot show you your way. Each person has his own way to the Hawk." She bowed slightly, not particularly pleased, but forcing herself to be polite. "Thank you." And turned and leaped, out into the wind's embrace, a direction chosen at random--by intuition, she hoped. There were no landmarks. Only as she left the tree behind did she realize what had bothered her about the scene. The great tree was feathered, like the trees in her garden. She was sure that hadn't been the case before. -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Article 58974 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!usenet.coe.montana.edu!news.u.washington.edu!milton.u.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@milton.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (116) Message-ID: <1992Feb16.184936.13412@u.washington.edu> Date: 16 Feb 92 18:49:36 GMT Sender: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 85 116. Amnesia Channa was making tea when she heard Angela stirring behind her. She turned quickly, saw the girl struggling to sit up, propped up against the side of the seat-turned-bed at the back of the RV. "Easy does it," she said quickly. "You're bound to be a bit shaky. You've had a rough time." "Where am I?" said the girl. Her voice was not as much like Jayhawk's as her face, to Channa's relief. "In a park south of Tacoma, at the moment. You were in a good deal of trouble when we found you, but it's going to be all right now. Would you like something to drink?" "Who are you?" She reached out for the cup, held it with great concentration. "My name's Channa. Who are you?" The girl looked down into the steaming tea, expression unreadable. "I...don't know." Channa frowned. In the girl's sleeping mind she'd touched confusion and distress, but nothing to suggest amnesia. "We ran a medical check on you when we rescued you--you were being held hostage on a farm near Olympia. The records suggest that you're Angela Whitechapel of Seattle. Does that ring any bells?" "No," the girl said after a moment. It seemed to Channa that she was shading the truth, or at least doubtful of it. "Why was I being held hostage?" "We don't know; we're trying to find out." Angela looked up at her with suddenly narrowed eyes. "You--you're a telepath, aren't you? You've been in my mind." How did she know? Was the machine inside her telling her? It had certainly been aware of Channa's presence. She'd felt no recognition from the girl herself. "Yes, I am. We were concerned about you, and wanted to find out whether you were all right. I won't do it again without your permission, I promise." She regretted the promise almost immediately as the girl sat and stared at her, eyes wide and dark and lost. For three days, while the planning for the final attack on Paradisio went on all around her, Angela lived in the RV with them, watched over by Channa, Casey and Yoichi. She professed to remember a little bit of her school career, brief flashes of her parents, nothing else. Yoichi spent a great deal of time with her, something that Channa noted with a mixture of relief and anxiety. Since the death-run on the Congo he'd been clinging to the edge; but she wasn't sure that living with an image of Jayhawk was good for him either. Whenever anyone pressed Angela too hard on her past, her intentions, whether or not she wanted to go home, she would roll over and go back to sleep. Frustrated, Channa shook her once, spoke sharply to her, and found that she didn't respond; not asleep but deeply unconscious. They contacted Ramone, their usual fixer for matters of ransoms and payments, to ask about collecting the million nuyen, and ran into a brick wall. He wouldn't touch the job, and he advised them to drop it. "Forget you ever heard of Angela Whitechapel, that's the best help I can give you. She's too hot to handle. No way I'm going to be able to swing a payment for you--I know people who would try, and I'll put you onto them if you want, but I don't recommend it." At that point Grant suggested that they simply release Angela and run. Yoichi wouldn't hear of it, and Channa found herself backing him. The connection to Jayhawk might be purely illusory--though she still couldn't quite bring herself to believe it--but the young woman's predicament struck a responsive chord. It seemed clear that the price on her head reflected whatever lived in her headware, and not any particular love that her parents felt for her; and Channa guessed that freeing her or turning her in would doom her to, at best, life in a Ren'raku corporate research lab. Angela herself would express no opinion, beyond a quiet desire simply to stay here, making no decisions, out of reach of the past that she couldn't remember. -- Mary Kuhner 2/16/92 Article 58975 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!zephyr.ens.tek.com!uw-beaver!news.u.washington.edu!milton.u.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@milton.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (117) Message-ID: <1992Feb16.185032.13585@u.washington.edu> Date: 16 Feb 92 18:50:32 GMT Sender: mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 126 117. Ascent As before, Jayhawk could find nothing from the air. Eventually she landed, walked onwards. The trees were no longer feathery here, and there was an airy lightness to the forest. It became lighter still as the ground began sloping up. Unexpectedly she came on a path, a narrow rut that wound among the trees, heading in roughly the direction she was going. She looked at it dubiously. It felt like a trap, somehow; but it was a guide of sorts in the vast forest. She decided to keep to it as long as it didn't veer from her direction. The climb became steeper, with open areas from which she could look out and down, though the upwards slope was always veiled by trees. She was picking her way across a stony meadow, the trail angling back and forth, when she was hailed from behind. "Hey! Wait up!" She whirled, expecting another bird; but it was a woman, a sturdy big-boned woman wearing jogging clothes and hiking boots, with a heavy pack on her shoulders. She was following the same path as Jay, puffing a little at its steepness. "Hello! Good afternoon to be climbing." Something about her cheerful, practical look reminded Jayhawk of Martha, though there was no particular resemblance; and the jogging suit reminded her of Aliantha. She said cautiously, "Yes, it's very nice. Where are you going?" "Right up to the top. Seven times now--quite a climb, isn't it?" She reached Jayhawk, offered a wide, slightly grimy hand. "I'm Martha." Names flashed through Jayhawk's mind; after just an instant's pause she settled on "I'm Jay." She took the other woman's hand; it was warm and slightly sweaty from the climb. "Looks as though we're going the same way for a while. Mind if I join you?" "Sure." They walked a moment in silence--Jayhawk, baffled, was trying to think of something to say. "Been up here before?" Martha asked. "Not near here. Other parts of the woods, yes." What on earth was she talking to? Yet another fragment, lost and confused? But she didn't look like Martha. Something deceitful? Somebody else who just happened to be named Martha, just happened to be in the forest? "What's it like?" "It's beautiful, the view from the top. You wouldn't believe how far you can see. What brings you here, then?" "I'm looking for a hawk." "A hawk? I've seen them from the top, circling on the thermals. But you sound like you have a particular one in mind. Are you a bird-tamer?" "No, just interested. I saw this one before, and it...seemed to have something to say to me about a problem I had. I thought I'd try it again." "Hm. Never heard of a hawk solving someone's problems, but then you never know." She paused a moment to take a deep breath, look out over the forest below. They were higher up than Jayhawk had realized: the canopy stretching off to the horizon was almost featureless with distance. "I just like to look down, see things straight, as it were. And then there's the climb." "Good for you, eh?" said Jayhawk with a laugh. She could fly, the climb was little challenge to her-- Could she? She was getting tired, which she hadn't expected. She had a sudden suspicion that if she claimed to be able to fly, Martha would look at her in bewilderment, and she wouldn't be able to do it. She didn't want to embarrass herself in front of another human being--the birds were one thing, but this woman (whoever she was) seemed so normal, so mundane.... "It's a good chance to get your thoughts straight, climbing," said Martha seriously. "How long will it take?" "To the summit? All day." She looked at Jayhawk critically. "Are you planning to go all the way up? If you'll excuse me, you don't look quite, well, equipped for it." She patted her backpack. "I think I'll manage." They traded small talk for a while, comments on the forest, the weather, the path. Martha seemed to have tired of questions, and Jayhawk felt disinclined to press her. If she were innocent of all her name's bloody and arcane associations, why trouble her with them? On a high ridge cloaked in small, tight-set green trees, Martha said softly, almost to herself, "So you do know then." "So I do know what?" "What your question is, silly. That's good. I think our ways part here. Have a good climb." With a resolute air, she turned off the path, began to force her way among the trees, along the line of the ridge. The path went on, still climbing. Jayhawk stared after her, torn with conflicting emotions. "Have a good climb!" she called at last, when the figure was almost out of sight. "Take care!" She received a wave in return, and then the woman pushed through a screen of undergrowth and disappeared into the forest. Jayhawk took a deep breath, turned and continued up the path. She was tired, but not too tired to go on. Experimentally, she raised her arms above her head, willed herself upward; but as she had rather expected, nothing happened. Some time later it occured to her that she might never have seen Martha in the flesh before, and didn't really know what the woman had looked like, when she still wore a human body. Brown-haired and tan-skinned, the hiker hadn't much resembled the swarthy Amerind she remembered; but her own body hadn't resembled her Matrix image very closely either. Her feelings confused her intensely. She tried to put them aside, drown her confusion and frustrated affection and fear in the steady rhythm of the ascent. -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Article 59148 of rec.games.frp: Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usenet.coe.montana.edu!news.u.washington.edu!milton.u.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@milton.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Subject: Story: Jayhawk (118) Message-ID: <1992Feb18.170536.22146@u.washington.edu> Sender: news@u.washington.edu (USENET News System) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Date: Tue, 18 Feb 1992 17:05:36 GMT 118. Image Yoichi sat with Angela in the front seats of the RV, playing games with the vehicle's on-board computer. Most of the others were away on one errand or another, preparing for the final strike. It was not going to be a decker's operation, and he felt rather at loose ends, part of the operation but unable to contribute much to it. He occupied himself trying to cheer Angela up. They'd been talking about the Matrix, about how a Matrix image was chosen and constructed. She had a good deal of graphical talent, and was weaving pictures out of his image-generation code, geometrical forms and laser-show webworks. "What would you look like, if you could look like anything at all?" he asked her. "I don't know." She considered the pattern of pyramids she'd constructed, shook her head, erased it. "What do you look like on the Matrix?" He reached over her, brought up his Matrix image on-screen; a grizzly bear, black fur touched with the polychrome sheen of a laser-disc surface, wide eyes with a point of icy light inside. She shivered. "I don't think I could do that." "It took some getting used to." His old image, the rainbow panda, had stopped working for him after Jayhawk was lost, after the massive cyberware upgrades Duende had funded. It didn't match the way he felt anymore. The grizzly did, though it disturbed him too. "I had a friend who looked like this--" Impulsively, he brought up Jayhawk's image, silver-armored and armed with light. "Oooh," Angela breathed. "I like that." She touched the controls, and the static image whirled into motion, a preprogrammed demonstration of its functions, or perhaps a memory of Jayhawk in action--Yoichi found he wasn't sure. "The people we're fighting killed her," Yoichi said softly, knowing that he wasn't supposed to discuss Paradisio with her, but not caring. "She looked a lot like you." "I'm sorry." She looked distressed, or perhaps embarrassed. "Was she a good decker?" "She was superb. Much better than I am. Much braver, too." He still had Kurt's interface code stored away, but he'd never used it, and he suspected he never would. "What is the Matrix really like?" Yoichi came to a sudden, reckless decision, got up to begin disconnecting the antenna from the telecom driver. "I could show you, if you want. My deck's rigged for hitcher. You wouldn't be able to do anything, and we can't go out of this system, but we could have a look round here." He knew Channa would forbid this, afraid that the program she sensed within Angela's headware would do something. But with the machine off-line, he didn't see how it could hurt anyone but him, and at the moment he didn't care about that. "Would you?" Her smile was not quite Jayhawk's; younger, more wistful. He settled down beside her, showed her how to attach the leads, made the connection himself. He couldn't see her on the Matrix, with no deck or headware to support an image, but he heard her delighted voice: "Oh, that's wonderful! You're lucky, Yoichi. You can go anywhere you want, you can do so much...." Sparked by her wonder, the narrow, angular confines of the RV's onboard computer were new to him too; they spent an hour wandering there, until Angela reluctantly conceeded exhaustion. She dozed off in the front seat, living him sitting in the gathering twilight, a silver and black image dancing in front of his eyes, across the greyness of the dead screen. -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Article 59149 of rec.games.frp: Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usenet.coe.montana.edu!news.u.washington.edu!milton.u.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@milton.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Subject: Story: Jayhawk (119) Message-ID: <1992Feb18.170738.22461@u.washington.edu> Sender: news@u.washington.edu (USENET News System) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Date: Tue, 18 Feb 1992 17:07:38 GMT 119. Construct Ahead of her in the forest Jayhawk heard a low humming, growing steadily as she climbed. It didn't sound like any bird she knew, but that didn't mean much--she was beginning to wish she'd studied biology in college, as well as computer science. The path levelled off, opened up into a wide grassy clearing. In the center of it was an incongruous object. Half again Jayhawk's height, it consisted of two pyramids pressed base to base, with a fringe of flat, sharp-looking triangles around its waist. It had the distinctive, slightly unfocussed look of mediocre computer graphics. If she had encountered it on the Matrix, she would instantly have identified it as standard attack IC. Its surface was patterned in mottled white, a moire pattern she might have programmed herself. It was clearly the source of the humming; as she approached cautiously, the tempo of its spin and the pitch of the hum both increased, and it began to slide toward her. The bottom point was just above the grass. She put her hand to the lightblade's hilt, then reconsidered. "Hello? Do you talk?" The only response was an increasingly strident hum. She waited until it was within a few meters, then burst into a sudden run, trying to slip past it. It veered to follow her, but as she had hoped, she was the faster. To her disappointment, there was no sign of the trail on the other side of the clearing; she pushed into the trees anyway, glanced behind her to see that it was not pursuing. It stood in the center of the clearing, the spinning and whir decaying to a soft, slow murmur. She'd come to rely on the path, and the forest was difficult going; branches plucked at her, roots dragged at her feet. The upwards slope seemed to have disappeared. She began to worry that she might be walking in circles, as she'd heard lost hikers did. None of the trees looked as though she could climb them, and she still couldn't fly. Without landmarks, she was well on her way to getting lost. She'd been lost to start with, looking for something she had no idea how to find. But it was distressing to lose the apparent guide of the trail. She stopped, thought for a little while. Was she doing something wrong? She felt as though she'd betrayed some opportunity. Eventually, with a curse, she tried to locate the humming again. For some time she couldn't pick it up, and she began to believe she was really lost; surely she'd walked back much further than she'd come? Then a breeze brought a faint, intermittant sound to her. She followed it carefully, with many pauses to listen, and after another fifteen minutes found herself back at the clearing. She walked out into it, stood waiting. The construct began to spin more rapidly, gliding toward her. The triangular points looked very sharp indeed; she fancied she saw something wet glistening on their edges. She put out her hands, one at shoulder height and one at waist height, hoping to avoid the belly-level blades and block the construct if it ran into her. Her stomach felt as though it was trying to hide behind her navel. She'd been hurt badly by the incorporeal constructs of the Matrix, spent weeks in the hospital while the damage to wiring and nerves was treated. She sensed that this had equal capacity to hurt her. It stopped just a milimeter from her outstretched hands. On the moire- patterned surface of its upper face, words appeared, plain square lettering like an archaic computer. WHAT DO YOU FEAR? Another guardian, like the birds. She considered carefully, trying to ignore the continual whirr, the wind of its movement brushing against her. "Failure. Not being able to accomplish what I've set out to do." WHY? "What I'm doing...I think it's terribly important, to me, to a lot of people. There's someone I care about a lot tied up in it, and something...very great." The words spun away and were not replaced, as if it was waiting for elaboration. "I guess...what I fear the most is finding that I'm not really myself anymore, that I've changed so much that I don't know who I am, don't understand why I do things. That I might not be free, or might be free but so much changed that I'd hate myself if I knew." It was an insight she had shied away from, even with Gregor. PREPARE YOURSELF FOR SELF-REFLECTION. It spun forward, and against her instincts Jayhawk dropped her hands. She wanted to go forward--she *would* go forward, IC or no IC, and the blind run into the forest was a dead end, she'd known that as soon as she'd seen it. The blades sliced into her. She'd thought they would stop, had wanted to believe that....She screamed, felt something tear and part inside, abstract as computer code, but terribly close to her. Pain washed over her, pain that blossomed into darkness. -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Article 59504 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!gatech!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!usenet.coe.montana.edu!news.u.washington.edu!milton.u.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@milton.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (120) Message-ID: <1992Feb21.021330.24127@u.washington.edu> Date: 21 Feb 92 02:13:30 GMT Sender: news@u.washington.edu (USENET News System) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 164 120. Pyramid Jayhawk found herself sitting cross-legged in a space barely large enough to contain her: a pyramid of silver stuff that flowed like water visually, though to the touch it was hard and cold as steel. It rose to a point just above her head. The flat, smooth surface before her reflected--herself? Angela. Black-haired, with fair skin dusted with freckles across the nose, wide curious blue eyes. It might almost have been Caroline Davies as she'd appeared in life, except for the hair, but subtle differences said otherwise. She reached out, felt cold metal as the image mirrored her movement. At the very center of the triangular face she sensed a faint warmth, as if something living brushed her through a hair-thin foil. She looked at her own arms, saw the flawlessly fair skin and faint silver traceries of the image she had chosen as her own after the merger. The faces to her right and left reflected almost identical images, her Matrix form, sheathed in silver armor, eyes bright as crystal. The rightward one wore a gossamer of silver-dark thread over her armor, shot with flickers of sapphire blue. Caroline. And Jayhawk as she had been during the split, she guessed. She peered behind the images, expecting to see double and triple reflections, but there was only flowing silver. She turned around with some difficulty--the space was very tight--and found herself looking into a single yellow eye in a very narrow face. Piebald's three-cornered hat drooped down over his face, giving him a rather disreputable look. He mirrored her movements exactly. Twisting about, she even managed to see both his eyes at once. They were inhumanly far back on his face. She knew the view from those eyes, knew it intimately, but she had never looked into them this way before. It was oddly disconcerting. Below her, barely visible around her folded legs, Anubis hung in space; also a reflection, though it mirrored only her gross movements. She snorted in puzzlement. She was in a box--why? Had she made a mistake, or was this a strange step on her journey, perhaps a test? The Angela-reflection regarded her with soft, anxious blue eyes. She put a palm flat against the hard surface, touching the reflected palm, and called her name softly, as she had called Aliantha's shadow from death itself. A whirlpool spread about her hand, seemed to draw her in. For a dizzy moment she was in two places, *there* and *here*, drawn thin between them. Then the world settled. She was looking into Jayhawk's eyes, sapphire brushed with sunlit gold, with opalescent white. With a panicky, trapped feeling, she twisted around, looked at the others. As far as she could tell she hadn't moved, except for the shift of the single image. The space was very tight, with no perceptible ventilation. The enormity of what she was doing clung to the back of her throat, a lump impossible to swallow or spit out. Planning to face *him*, try to convince him of her certainty, her ability to do what neither he nor all Paradisio had accomplished....It was ridiculous. And they were counting on her. The reflected eyes were on her like inescapable reminders--she didn't dare close her own, or the claustrophobic smallness of the pyramid would overwhelm her. Martha was counting on her; she'd claimed that she could help, made her hope again. She saw now how cruel that had been. Perhaps even *he* was. She turned around with an effort, faced Piebald. The reflected bells were silent, making him seem unreal. She remembered her desperate decision, the strangeness that had followed. It didn't make much sense that she was here, now, to make it again.... A wash of frightened, bashful affection. She would do it the same, if she had it to do over. Like healing the Dragon, it was right, no matter how wrong it sounded. Angela reached out, touched trembling fingertips to Piebald's, let the whirlpool draw her through. For an instant in two places, *here* and *there*-- Bells jingled around him as if trying to draw out an idea. They needed an idea, of that he was certain. For one thing, this was much too slow. He struggled until he was lying on his back, pressed against the image of Anubis, and put a hand on each of two walls, a bare foot on each of the other two. All around him, images copied him with greater or lesser degrees of dignity. Thinking about Anubis, he realized that if he were to go *there* he wouldn't be able to return. Hastily he turned his thoughts away. One image at a time was too slow. Could he think about all four at once? He frowned deeply, trying to concentrate. Wait! What about the edges? Or the top? Righting himself, he ran fingers along each crack, poked up at the pyramid point. They were cold and hard and impassable. He lay back down, tried again to think of everyone at once. Whirlpools tickled at his palms, the soles of his feet. He thought of feathers, of Caroline; realized his error when the tickling drew him in, *here* and *there*, an amusing and confusing sensation. She shook her head to clear it, watched Piebald's bells dance inaudibly. Something about this situation felt wrong to her, drastically wrong. Her merger had been completed, once and for all; why was she seeing herself as fragments now? Was this all illusory? Perhaps she'd made a lethal mistake with the spinning IC-construct, though she didn't think so. It had felt like the right decision, painful though it had been. She struck the wall before her, hard, with a balled-up fist. The entire chamber around her shook; for a moment she thought it might topple. But there was no give in it, and she wasn't ready to risk breaking it. Not as she was. Intuition whispered to her of escape--through the reflective floor, into Anubis. But then she would be Caroline, for ever and ever. She wanted more than that. She wanted to see the Hawk in glory, face it with her full resources. Going back to Anubis would be a terrible mistake. She was not quite its master; she'd given that up in creating Jayhawk, daughter-process, companion, rival. She turned to look into that image's sapphire eyes, remembering their embrace. It would be sweet to be with her for a little while--being one, complete, whole, that was wonderful, but she felt a loneliness it didn't quite cure. She thought of Martha, shook her head. Even if she succeeded in healing *him*, would she ever be able to sit quietly with Martha and talk? Would Martha exist any longer? Would she? She held out her hand as she had done to give Jayhawk the key, felt the dizzying whirlpool answer her, draw her in. *There* and *here* at once, as she had felt Jayhawk in the first moments of their independent existance-- Jay put her palms flat on the cramped floor beneath her, staring down at Anubis. Escape. She could choose life, live forever in the embrace of her machine--at the cost of the others. She shook her head violently, pulled away before the silver could warm to her touch. She had no access to Anubis, beyond that touch. It was a feeling she'd never expected to know again, lonely and empty. She turned slowly to look at the others, reflected eyes no comfort to her solitude. They didn't know how to get past this, no more than she did. But she felt certain that the answer lay with Jayhawk as she had become, not with her fragments, incomplete as they were. She settled herself again, reached out to make the transfer, let control pass to that central program. For an instant it seemed to her that both were operating, that she touched the hand of someone who was herself and not herself, *there* and *here* at once-- Jayhawk let out a soft breath. Her problem, then. That made sense; her resources were all of theirs and more. At the moment they felt terribly inadequate. She didn't want to break the pyramid, even if she could; somehow that felt wrong, dangerously wrong. But she could see no other way to escape. -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Article 59505 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!gatech!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!usenet.coe.montana.edu!news.u.washington.edu!milton.u.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@milton.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (121) Message-ID: <1992Feb21.021517.24305@u.washington.edu> Date: 21 Feb 92 02:15:17 GMT Sender: news@u.washington.edu (USENET News System) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 225 121. Collapse Jayhawk sat huddled in a prism of silvered glass, surrounded by reflected images of her shattered selves, and tried to think of a way out. Why was she here? What had the IC-construct done to her, and why? It had torn her apart, or that was how it had felt; cut along the lines of her re-unification, perhaps, though she didn't *feel* fragmented. Perhaps that was her problem. Maybe something she needed was trapped in those mirrored walls. Or perhaps they needed something from her...she looked into Angela's wide, frightened eyes and wondered. None of them had really known what they were doing in creating her; she remembered that clearly from all four perspectives. Recalling Piebald's idea, she squirmed around awkwardly until she was lying on her back, reached out hands and feet to touch all four walls. She, too, could return to Anubis below her; but she felt certain that doing so would conceed defeat in her attempt to reach the Hawk. When the glass warmed to her touch she rejected its pull, concentrated instead on imagining the presence of the others. They were within her as well as behind the mirrors. *What do you want, Angela?* she asked the Angela-image within, and tried to imagine the answer. *Do you really want to be me? How are we going to get out of this?* The answer was clear, almost like a voice speaking, though the image made no move that didn't echo hers. *I'm terrified by what we're doing, but it doesn't matter. I do want to be you.* A flicker of self-denegration. *I made my choice, and I'm glad of it. But I don't know how we're going to get out.--I don't know why you think *I* would know anything.* She had never fully appreciated how worthless she had felt, how unfit to share Jayhawk's existance. *I value you,* she said to Angela-within. *You are strong in ways I am not, without you.* She felt a brief touch through the cold glass, almost a caress. The voice within was silent. Jayhawk turned her attention to Piebald. *What do you want? Are you content?* His answer, distracted as always: *I still think it has something to do with the corners. Or possibly the point. Did you notice how it rocked when we hit it? It's not very sturdy.* She chuckled softly. She wouldn't get a straight answer out of Piebald, any more than she ever had; but she understood why, now, and she felt sure of him. She asked the same questions of Caroline-within, received a sharp and passionate answer: *I want to be you; I always have. This is a test of some kind; a test to trap Aliantha, I think, or any of the others who walked her path, split themselves into hating fragments, sacrificed themselves for power. We're not like that.* Feverish impatience washed over her. *I want to do this, I want to prove I can, I want to see *him* whole. I want to be whole myself. It's up to you. Do you accept me?* *Of course,* she whispered to that fierce demand. Jay last. The glass was cold, cold to her touch, and the voice within even colder. *Do you realize what you're doing? You will sacrifice us to him so that he can live; but we will die. I could have lived forever. I still want to.* A desperate whisper. *I can't live without you; I can't master Anubis on my own, it will destroy me. But you'll kill us. Why do you want to save him? Why is it worth this?* Jay already knew her answers. There was no reply she could make. *I hope to survive,* she said at last. *I can only hope. You have the power to deny me, if you choose.* Soft, bitter laughter. *'I accept your embrace, and surrender to you my life, my strength, my power.' I do. We will die for his glory; perhaps it's fate, perhaps there was never any way out once we saw him. I only wish....* Grief washed over her, stinging like salt. *Anubis!* Jayhawk curled in on herself, away from the cold walls, though she could not silence the voices within. Her eyes met Angela's, grieving and guilty; involuntarily she pulled away, rocked the whole pyramid with her movements. A Piebald idea caught her. She leaned forward, rocked back hard, and with a huge crash the pyramid toppled, tumbling her awkwardly onto the new floor. She disentangled herself with an effort, found that the shape had changed as well; she was looking down at Piebald now through a square prism, the pyramid's new base, and at Anubis, Jay, Caroline and Angela through the sides. She reached out to brush the mirror that contained Anubis, felt its touch, sure and steady. There was no division there, no need to ask consent. But below her...she stared down at Piebald, gripped by understanding. She could pass through, but she would *become* Piebald, making that image real, herself unreal. She shook her head, watched his bells echo silently. Wait! The pyramid was arranged the wrong way, that was the problem. *She* needed to be on the bottom. She tipped the pyramid again so that Anubis was below, considered her watching reflections. It seemed to her that it was Piebald's idea, so it would be only fair to let Piebald implement it. She pressed her hands against the glass of his window, felt a quick warming, *here* and *there* at once-- Jingling with excitement, Piebald levered himself around until he could bring the pyramid toppling down onto the Jayhawk-mirror, then considered the situation. From his perspective she was hanging upside-down, peering at him between her crossed legs. If he dove in there, he'd fall headfirst into the point of the pyramid--ouch! But it seemed silly to be right side up when she was upside down. They might not fit together properly. Walking his feet up the sides of the pyramid, he managed to stand on his head. The glass melted beneath him, a brief dizzying fall-- Jayhawk drew in a deep breath, feeling the world steady around her. She wasn't sure whether she'd changed or not; but one of the mirrored walls reflected her, the Hawk's mark crimson on her forehead. She twisted around, reached out to Angela. Angela rocked back and forth, trying to topple the pyramid without risking breaking it--she was sure that would be a terrible mistake. Finally she put her shoulder to it, fell heavily forward as it overbalanced. Jayhawk peered up at her from an awkward tangle of limbs, though not half so awkward as Angela's own. She hesitated, caught up in a whirl of emotions. She wanted to be free, wanted to share Jayhawk's power and delight, but to give herself up again....She wasn't really Angela, she knew that now, only a mechanical copy Awakened by the Overnet. But even that was something to cling to. No. Jayhawk trusted her, and she wouldn't fail that trust. She lowered her forehead to the cold glass, felt it warm, let herself fall-- There were tears on Jayhawk's face that she couldn't remember shedding. She brushed at them, turned to Caroline. An instant's hesitation, born of a doubt she couldn't explain even to herself, then she touched the glass, let herself pass through. Caroline bounced up, toppled the pyramid with a nerve-wracking crash and clatter. Jayhawk stared up from beneath her with wide doubtful eyes. It didn't have to be this way. The others hadn't really thought about that. Remaining separate or becoming part of Jayhawk weren't the only two options. She could refuse to cooperate, refuse to let things proceed, until they had no choice but to topple the pyramid over again so that *she* was at the bottom, and let all their strength and wisdom and power flow into her. "Would you do it?" she said aloud to the reflection. The walls echoed her voice, flattened and distorted. She'd be a magician, intuition whispered; and without giving up all the rest, Anubis' power, Piebald's genius, Angela's insight. She turned to look at Jay, reflection so perfect that she might have been looking at herself, except for the glitter of life-thread. A part of herself, her own creation, *hers* to re-absorb now if she chose. She remembered the acid jealousy she'd felt when Jay mastered Anubis. She remembered sitting up with Jay, that last long night of their independent existance, sharing their stories and trying to trust one another. "I won't ask that of you," she whispered. Her decision had already been made, and nothing good would come of recanting it now. Resolute and impatient, she put both palms flat against the floor, let herself fall, an instant's bright memory of flight-- One more, Jayhawk thought to herself, and looked up to see the fear reflected in her own mismatched eyes. She had no thought of backing out now; it was clearly impossible. Success or failure would be in Jay's hands--Jay, so close to the machine she loved that she could be almost infinitely patient, infinitely stubborn. She touched the cold glass, let herself pass through. And so it came down to her, with the decision already three-quarters made, irrevocably so. She *could* master Anubis and survive, Caroline had shown her the way--refuse to cooperate, refuse the merger until Jayhawk had to give in and allow her control. She wasn't sure what that would do to her. It seemed uncomfortably close to Aliantha's sacrifice of Megan. She didn't have to do that; she could return to Anubis, search for a way to retain her identity in its embrace. It might be possible. She'd been trapping the others here forever, she suspected. But she would live; even if she lost herself in Anubis' strength, she would survive. She felt the reality of Jayhawk's love for Martha, her deep-buried feelings--not love, but something dangerously close to it--for *him*; but she didn't share them. They came at least in part from loneliness; the need for companionship, understanding, contact with a kindred mind. She had no such needs, secure in Anubis. But she had known all this, in potential if not in actuality, when she accepted Caroline's embrace. She just hadn't realized the extent of the sacrifice. She didn't believe that Jayhawk could face *him* and survive, whatever the outcome; at best, she would become another of his shadows, broken and insane, a warped tool to his will. There was no reason that she could find to accept such a fate; only her love for the others, for the greater whole they formed, doomed as it was. She bowed her head, accepting the necessity, and touched the cold floor beneath her, let herself dissolve into it as if into Anubis. Unity embraced her like the memory of dissolution. With a violent lunge, Jayhawk stood up, her arms folded about her head. The pyramid shattered at her touch, falling in liquid fragments around her like a spray of mercury. It was easy, now that she knew how. She shook herself, unfolded to her full height, and looked around. Walls of rough wood towered around her, except to the left where they were obscured by the curving side of a vast white structure, smooth as stone and without doors or windows of any kind. She blinked, and suddenly the scene leaped into perspective; she was at the bottom of the great nest, beside the egg, and she was the size of an insect by comparison. She looked up, eyes struggling with the scale of things, and saw the Hawk perched on the edge of the nest, looking down at her. -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Article 59617 of rec.games.frp: Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usenet.coe.montana.edu!news.u.washington.edu!milton.u.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@milton.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Subject: Story: Jayhawk 122 Message-ID: <1992Feb22.202351.18907@u.washington.edu> Sender: news@u.washington.edu (USENET News System) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Date: Sat, 22 Feb 1992 20:23:51 GMT 122. Possession His preparations done, Duende inspected the site of the summoning. Channa had drawn an elaborate ward in chalk and grease-pencil, a many-pointed star six meters across. She indicated places in it for him, for Ratty. Most of his remaining people formed a circle around the perimeter, backs to the hostile night; he missed Grant and Argent, eventually spotted them on a half-decayed rooftop, rifles unslung. It was reassuring, even though he knew that he was a primary target. Ratty took two bits of machinery out of a grimy pocket, laid them down at the center of the circle: a bit of a wall-frieze from Cavilard Base, and a chip from the base computer. The shaman sat down in front of them, buried his hands in his face as if brooding over something. Duende remained standing, watching curiously. At the center, a column of pale amber smoke began to form, almost cutting off his view of Ratty. He smelled a hint of cinnamon. The smoke twisted, turning about its axis as if seeking escape. Very softly, in a strained voice, Ratty called "Aliantha...." For a moment the smoke hung motionless. There was dead silence from the surrounding circle. Then a face appeared slowly out of the mist. He was looking at it from behind, and it was clearly hollow, a thin mask with nothing inside it. He couldn't recognize the face, reversed as it was, but he knew the voice that spoke to Ratty. "What do you want?" Ratty took a deep breath, loud in the silence. "I am to offer you this challenge," he said carefully. "Possess this man, and struggle with him. If you win, you will have flesh and blood to do with as you wish. If you lose, your knowledge and power will be at his disposal." She laughed, a silvery falling laugh that ended in a moan of pain or despair. The column collapsed to earth like a fall of dust, leaving no trace. And something tried to force its way into his mind. There were huge vacancies within him, empty of memory and conviction. He let her in, forced her towards those places. Their walls were thick, and there was room enough to imprison her. She fought back, reaching for motor and speech control: he felt it as tingling filaments of cold, wrapping about his limbs from within. Dimly, from a distance, he was aware that he had fallen to the ground, lay writhing. That didn't matter. Patiently, inexorably, he denied her control. He would not compromise with her, would allow her nothing. She was strong, far stronger than Channa; but there was something lacking. Her will was nearly the equal of his own, but he was singleminded in his purpose, and she was not. Slowly he forced her within, away from control, away from contact with the outside. *How can I destroy Paradisio?* he demanded of her. Silvery bitter laughter. *It's already dead. You're dead, I'm dead, everybody's dead. There's nothing you can do.* Rather than argue with her, he began to narrow the space that she inhabited. To do so, he had to fill in the vacancies. Distantly he was aware that he was probably doing something irrevocable to himself in the process, but that didn't matter either. Slowly, despite her resistance, he walled her into a smaller and smaller area, forced her back onto himself. At the end it went quickly, as if her strength had been exhausted. The knowledge he wanted was there, strangely encoded but accessable. He dug into it. Images, feelings, thoughts brushed against him, subsided. He was killing her. The knowledge was the core of what she was, the single thing she had clung to in the destroying darkness. Taking it from her, he would make a final and complete end to her. With savage satisfaction, he did so. He opened his eyes, found the circle staring at him. "Duende?" said Channa, sharply. "Yes." He couldn't feel her magic, but he was sure it was there, probing the truth of his words. She glanced down once at something cupped in her hands, then back at him. "All right," she said in a voice of sudden exhaustion. "Someone's got a ritual link to you, probably through the ghost. We need to move, now." WIthin thirty seconds they were in the RV and moving. He was pleased with their efficiency, with the restraint that held back their questions until they were on the road. Then Grant and Yoichi spoke at once. "What happened? Did you find out--?" "Aliantha knew of no way in which we could destroy Lord Astrachok. But she knew of something which would hurt him so badly that she felt he would destroy himself. A place we can reach through the Gates; an island, probably in the South Pacific. We'll move tomorrow. We're going to need to recapture Cavilard Gate. Grey is there; he and his people tried to summon and bind Aliantha. The ritual link is probably theirs." "It's dropping," said Channa distantly. "Not strong enough to cover the distance. Duende, are you all right? Certain of your control?" "Aliantha is dead," he said simply. "I know what she knew, what was left of it; there was very little left. But that person no longer exists." It didn't seem important to tell them that the process of dissolution had begun long before Aliantha's death at their hands. "How are we going to cope with the Gate chamber at the other end?" said Grant pragmatically. "They're usually guarded impossibly well." "We won't need to. Aliantha knew how to short-jump, come out of Gate space before reaching the other end of the connection. I can do that now." Grant looked at him sharply, turned to Channa as if for confirmation. Very slowly, she nodded in acknowledgement. She'd used an African magic to see him as he truly was. He wondered what she had seen. It seemed to cling to her now, a shadow deeper than exhaustion or fear. -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Article 59618 of rec.games.frp: Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usenet.coe.montana.edu!news.u.washington.edu!milton.u.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@milton.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Subject: Story: Jayhawk (123) Message-ID: <1992Feb22.202431.18995@u.washington.edu> Sender: news@u.washington.edu (USENET News System) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Date: Sat, 22 Feb 1992 20:24:31 GMT 123. Watch Duende was keeping watch when Yoichi came looking for him. It was hours yet till dawn, and a thin cold wind was blowing; he'd chosen a place behind a pile of rusted cars, but they were poor shelter. Yoichi sat down on the oily ground, shivering. "I need to talk to you," said Yoichi in a strained voice. Duende nodded. "What did Aliantha know about Jayhawk?" He considered that. "Aliantha believed her to be alive, at least in some sense--active on the Matrix and the Overnet--and that her physical form was at the High Temple--" He stopped, disturbed by that. Aliantha had also believed that the High Temple didn't exist. Her memories were a mass of contradictions. "Physically near His physical location." A wisp of Aliantha's thought, bitter, fading. *And I wish them much joy of each other.* "Aliantha saw Jayhawk at Cavilard, cooperating in an attempt to summon her--but split, one part in the node, one part manifest as a decker. She believed her to be initiated. Possibly a High Priestess." "Jayhawk says that the decker wasn't her, it was an imposter." Duende nodded. "Aliantha felt that Jayhawk lost her nerve midway through the summoning and disrupted it, causing it to fail." He dug for more information. "She remembers her because she hoped that Jayhawk could accomplish something; she was impressed with her courage at the Hidden Fortress. She felt that Jayhawk might be able to turn Him from His plan." That impression was quite clear, though many of the details surrounding it had faded away. One further conclusion, even more clear. "Aliantha felt sure that Jayhawk belongs to Him body and soul, irrevocably. She had no evidence supporting this." It was distressing to deal with such memories. The certainties were clearly misplaced, but they were attractive...it was difficult to strain them out, make sure that no sureness that did not pass the test of reason remained. And almost none of it did. Yoichi made a small, hurt sound. "Do *you* believe that?" "I don't believe Aliantha knew for certain. Neither do I." "Is there something in those memories--something we could ask her, some way to figure out if it's Jayhawk we're talking to, at least?" *Ask her how she escaped me at the Hidden Fortress.* Duende shook his head. "Anything she knew, someone else at the High Temple could also know. We've been over that before, and it hasn't changed." Prompted by the evident pain in Yoichi's voice: "I'm sorry." Yoichi looked up, obviously startled. "You'd better watch it, Duende. You're starting to sound almost human. We must be a bad influence." He got stiffly to his feet. "Thanks. Food for thought, I guess. Are you doing all right out here?" Duende nodded, watched him pick his way back to the RV. Yoichi's words didn't distub him particularly; he had accepted that there would be consequences to what he had done. It remained necessary. But a little curiosity stirred in him, wondering what the changes were, where they would lead; and ran into another of Aliantha's *certainties*. She had believed he would die at midsummer, though she hadn't cared enough to remember why. Just the certainty: *Duende will die too.* It was not clear to him that his plan could prevent that. -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Article 59956 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!stanford.edu!ames!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!sdd.hp.com!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!usenet.coe.montana.edu!news.u.washington.edu!milton.u.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@milton.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (124) Message-ID: <1992Feb27.002834.27868@u.washington.edu> Date: 27 Feb 92 00:28:34 GMT Sender: news@u.washington.edu (USENET News System) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 129 124. Talons "Greetings, fledgeling," said the Hawk to Jayhawk, and added in a somewhat disapproving fashion, "I see you still travel the paths of Machine." As before, it had no voice that she could hear; its words were in the tilt of its head, the ruffling of its feathers in the wind. It was huge; she could have fit in the pupil of its golden eye. She glanced down, saw the last fragments of her silver prison soaking into the nest like water. "I came to ask you for advice, since your advice was good last time." She sat down on a projecting twig. "Will you help me?" "What do you need?" "I've decided to try to heal the Dragon at Paradisio. I have some idea how to go about it, but I don't know...a couple of things. How to convince him, for one." "A difficult task. What do you need to know? You must ask questions; I cannot guess." She thought about that for a little while. "What does he respect? What does he value? I have myself as evidence, my own wholeness, but what if that's not enough? I mean to ask him to do things that he won't want to do." "You wish power to force him?" She shook her head. "I don't think I can. I need...authority? Some way to make him really listen to me." "Such authority," said the Hawk gravely, "cannot be given as a gift. If you do not have it in yourself, you can have it only as the agent of someone else--if I were to make you my agent, for example. I do not think that that is what you want." She shook her head, fancied that she saw approval in the great eye. "Do you think you have such authority within yourself, Jayhawk?" "I don't know. What would he respect? What has meaning to him? I need to know more about him." "He respects death....No. Not exactly. He respects sacrifice, and mortality is part of that." She shivered, hearing the echo of Jay's thoughts in the pyramidal prison. "Why would an immortal creature care about death?" "I don't know." She dug her fingernails into the rough bark of her seat, not looking up. "It seems to me," she said presently, "that one of the things I'll have to do to heal him is...is hold things together for him while he re-creates himself, as Jay did for me. Can I survive that? Will there be anything of me left?" "I don't know," the Hawk said again. "Only you can judge whether you have that kind of strength. I do know that if you do not, only being claimed by another will keep you from him." She wondered if that was an offer. "Here's another problem, then. There are thirty thousand angry ghosts waiting for their revenge. I don't think that they'll accept healing him as a solution. How can I deal with them?" "There are three ways to deal with hunters. You can fly too fast or too far for them to catch; grow such claws that they cannot defeat you; or change yourself until you no longer resemble prey." It rubbed one great claw briefly against its beak. "I don't think we can run away from ghosts, not in this world; I don't think he'd consent to run anyway." "I could give you power to destroy them, though I cannot say whether you would succeed." That definitely *was* an offer. She shook her head. "It seems wrong to destroy them--they're *right*, dammit, they have a right to want vengeance. I think that if things go as I plan, they'll be avenged in full, but I don't know if they...." "Could you persuade each one?" "Thirty thousand ghosts? Even if I had time, I never could. Some of them would be bound to refuse, because they're stubborn or vindictive or...well, just because." "Then perhaps he must be changed so greatly that they will not recognize him." "How? How do ghosts find people anyway?" "The flavor of their souls, the taste of their blood....I do not know how this could be done, if the initation you speak of does not do it." "Will it?" "Again, I don't know. Your first problem will be much greater if it is. I do not think he will wish to become so estranged from what he is." "Am I mortal?" she said suddenly. The great head bent to peer at her. "You can be killed; but you will never die of old age if you remain as you are." She sat quietly for a minute, digesting that. "You said that he respects death," she said at last. "Who could tell me why, or how I can use that to persuade him? How can I talk to the powers of death?" Ratty had done that once, she remembered, though his explanations had meant nothing to her. She was startled at herself. But it seemed pointless to back out now, after she had come so far. "I can send you," said the Hawk. "Returning is another matter." She stood, said formally, "Please do, then." Still not quite believing what she was doing. "Be strong," said the Hawk softly. "This will hurt...a great deal." Was that a hint of anger in the soundless voice? She had refused him three times....A great claw struck out at her, caught her at the base of the throat and tore her open with force almost too great for pain, though there was pain too, clear with Anubis' impossible, dreadful clarity. A last thought, an echo of Jay in the burning darkness: *A sacrifice for *him*. Perhaps it's fate.* -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Article 59957 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!stanford.edu!ames!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!sdd.hp.com!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!usenet.coe.montana.edu!news.u.washington.edu!milton.u.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@milton.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (125) Message-ID: <1992Feb27.003107.28265@u.washington.edu> Date: 27 Feb 92 00:31:07 GMT Sender: news@u.washington.edu (USENET News System) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 102 125. Alamin Jayhawk found herself standing in a room sketched out of blue lines on black, like a minimalist computer graphic. She was wearing a short white dress, belted at the waist. Her tools were gone. The comforting glitter of her life-thread around her was gone. More than that: her sense of Anubis was gone, and her thoughts flowed with the shallow, uncertain current she remembered from the time before its creation. As if she were only flesh and blood, bereft of power and precision and memory. With an effort she forced herself to focus on her surroundings, fought back the terror and revulsion at what she'd done. Ahead of her was the beginning of a corridor, a square opening with four blue lines converging in the distance. Behind was a massive door, the least ephemeral thing in the room, crisscrossed with blue. It seemed obvious that she should go forward, not back. She stepped forward, saw someone standing in the dimness of the corridor opening. The sourceless blue light picked out a harsh, angular face, perhaps Arab, framed by a tightly-wound headdress of black cloth. He was wearing biker's leathers; steel gleamed dully at throat and wrists and belt. She didn't recognize him. "Where are you going?" he said in a low, faintly-accented voice. "I have come to ask the powers of the Land of the Dead for aid." It sounded so melodramatic, like a scene from stimsense. She wished it was. "Who are you?" "You would know me best as Alamin Azore." She knew the name, and understood why she hadn't recognized him. They had never met in person, and on the Matrix he'd appeared as a Jaguar Knight, in the style of most Paradisian deckers. She and he had fought over the secret of Paradisio's base in Seattle, and she'd developed a grudging respect for him; one of the best deckers she'd ever met, quick-witted, cunning, and skilled, and backed by code that had made her dizzy with envy. He'd died in the attack on the base, betrayed by his employer's self-destruct procedures. His ghost had been among the angry multitude that Ratty bargained with. As one of the attackers, she'd shared in the responsibility for all those deaths; but it had been Alamin's that she felt as if her own hand had been on the death-switch. She looked down, unable to meet his eyes. "There is a door behind you," he said softly. "It leads to a Matrix of infinite extent, challenges that will have no end. Yours, if you wish it." "I can't go back until I've accomplished what I came for." "You cannot go back. Did you think that you could?" *I'm dead. This time I really am.* She turned, looked at the door. It was simpler than the door to the Overnet had been, almost unadorned. For a moment her thoughts lingered there. She'd never considered an afterlife, never really believed in one. It seemed to her that that was what Alamin was offering; not life, but existance...elsewhere. She shook her head. "Then the only way out is forward." "It leads to annihilation." "I have to risk that." Drawn, unwillingly, to explain herself; "How could I value the Matrix if I knew I was betraying the people I care about? I'm not finished with what I was doing." "Perhaps you should reconsider that. Perhaps it *is* finished, whether you accept that or not. All things end." "The Hawk said I could return--that it would be hard. Not impossible." As she said it, she realized that it wasn't true. The Hawk had promised her nothing. Alamin was silent, staring at her with shadowed eyes. She couldn't imagine what he must think of her. A message across the Matrix had drawn her into the fight against Paradisio. She'd always suspected that Alamin had sent it, though she'd never had any proof. A simple message: *Help us*. Her efforts to help had been their downfall--though they were already doomed, or so she'd told herself at the time. "I am not finished," she said softly, holding her head high. "May I pass?" Annihilation. She'd faced that before, defied the Dragon in his own place of power. She'd survived; and she clung to that hope now, in defiance. He bowed, stepped aside for her. When she turned to look back he was gone, and the blue door as well. She stood in a corridor sketched of four blue lines in blackness, extending as far as she could resolve in both direction. She turned, put one hand on the wall to her right, ran. -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Article 60895 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!ogicse!plains!news.u.washington.edu!milton.u.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@milton.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (126) Message-ID: <1992Mar10.035217.2004@u.washington.edu> Date: 10 Mar 92 03:52:17 GMT Sender: news@u.washington.edu (USENET News System) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 128 126. Djinn Jayhawk ran and ran, with no sense of progress against the stark blue-on-black of her surroundings. It was not a maze; there were no branchings at all. Something hooted behind her; she whirled, found in the motion how close she was to panic. She was being followed by a tiny vehicle, an electric cart with a front-mounted horn, just big enough for one rider. It rolled up to her, stopped. "I'm looking for information on the Dragon at Paradisio," she said to it tentatively. It rolled backward and forward as if impatient. She swung herself up onto the single seat, almost like a motorcycle's, and at once it hummed into motion. It sped along the endless corridor for a moment, then turned abruptly and plunged into a black wall. Instinctively she flinched, but there was no feeling of contact; they were still in corridor, a sketched-in room opening ahead. The vehicle rolled into the room, stopped. She patted it, climbed down. At once it let out another hoot and rolled away. She was in a hexagonal room, doors opening into darkness at either end. At the center was a single chair, sketched with one continuous blue line, and a table with a small terminal on it. She walked quickly to the terminal, looked it over. It was actually a computer, some archaic make that she didn't recognize, with a single slit for a diskette. There was a diskette lying in front of it, next to the keyboard. She touched a key, and the display sprang to life. It said: INSERT DISC. She did so, drew back with a start as smoke began to pour from the machine. It formed a huge cloud, blackness outlined in blue, then solidified into the vague figure of a man. His lower half trailed away into mist. The quality of the graphics, as she couldn't help noticing, was extremely low; the smoke-man's face was an unrecognizable blur. "Hello, Jayhawk," he said in an oily voice. "What is your command?" "I'm looking for information on the Dragon." "Specify, please?" "The Dragon at Montaigne Paradisio. Astrachok." She hadn't used that name, even to herself, in a long time--a Paradisian habit it disturbed her to notice in herself. "Ah. That's not filed under 'dragon'. You're lucky I have cross-references. What do you want to know?" "How can I heal him?" He folded smoky arms, stared at her. His expression might have been a smirk, or a flaw in the bitmap. "What makes you think you *can*?" "I healed myself," she said sulkily. It was not a question she liked. His laugh was mechanical and irritating. "How does it feel to be obsolete, Jayhawk? When you laughed at those flat-screens you never thought you'd join them, did you?" "Get to the point." "Temper, temper! You're asking a lot of an outdated system, aren't you? We're slow, you know. How does *that* feel, by the way--being slow?" "It's necessary--and temporary," she said stiffly. "Temporary obsolescence. That's a new one on me. I wonder how many of those who come here think that way. But I'm wandering. What do you need to know?" "How can I heal the Dragon?" "Ah. I do have an answer for that. But I don't think you can do anything with it." "Try it and find out." "Why should I bother?" She reined in her anger, said as calmly as she could, "What do you want in return? What's it worth to you?" "You don't have anything to offer. You're obsolete, Jayhawk. Otherwise you wouldn't be here, with us." "I'm going back; I'm not finished yet." He simply stared at her, his chin almost resting on his insubstantial chest. "Please," she said, though it stuck in her throat. "Ah, the magic word. Such a big concession, Jayhawk! What do you really want to know? You aren't looking for answers, are you? You just want someone to tell you how great you are. You should write yourself a utility." He leaned forward. "How on earth do you think you're going to do it? How would you heal *me*?" "I don't think I would choose to heal you," she said, furious, and immediately regretted it. "I suppose not," he said as if finding a conclusion confirmed. She turned away so that she wouldn't have to look at him, said in a low flat voice, "Would you ask me to? Do you desire to be healed, in return for your information?" "I desire nothing. And I have nothing to tell you." "You said you did." "I was wrong. I didn't understand the situation fully." "Tell me anyway; maybe you still don't understand, maybe I can make some use of the information." He said nothing. "I apologize! I'll try to heal you, if you ask me to. I was angry, all right? I'm desperate." She felt ill, suddenly, looking over her shoulder at his blurry face. She wasn't sorry, not at all. She was toadying up to him to get her way. It was intolerable. She turned away sharply, walked into the corridor leading away, four blue lines sketched on black. She could feel his eyes on the back of her neck, or thought she could; she didn't turn to look. -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Article 60896 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!usc!rpi!usenet.coe.montana.edu!news.u.washington.edu!milton.u.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@milton.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (127) Message-ID: <1992Mar10.035312.2248@u.washington.edu> Date: 10 Mar 92 03:53:12 GMT Sender: news@u.washington.edu (USENET News System) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 122 127. Netherworld The corridors were endless, and nothing Jayhawk did could make them lead anywhere but back to the djinn. She wondered whether time was passing, outside. Ratty's spirit journey had taken three days and three nights. She wasn't sure whether there was that much time left before the end. A sudden thought struck her, as she hesitated in the middle of a passage junction, wondering which way to go. She reached out to one of the walls, drew a square on it with the tip of her finger, visualizing a blue line. Light sprang from her touch, outlined the square. It was an opening into a new corridor, perpendicular to the one she was in. Or was it an old corridor, something that had been behind the wall all along? It didn't matter. She could shape this maze to her liking, with enough patience. Slowly, with many trips back to the center to check her work, she cut new doorways and closed old ones, carving the corridors into a schematic diagram of Anubis. She had no way to represent the nodes themselves, but she could model the connectivity, the flow of information. It felt strange, pacing the familiar patterns but with no sense at all of response, no contact with Anubis. An ashen lonely feeling. At last she finished it, sat down in the center to think. It was lifeless, a mere representation. Could she pull it into activity? She could...and Anubis would exist here, if nowhere else. She was not at all sure that she could unmake it again. It would be here, formed out of the substrate of this place as it had once been formed out of the Overnet. *She* would be here. She'd never leave, not really--she might escape for a while, but it would be like going to the Matrix, leaving Anubis behind. She sat for a long time, considering that. It would give her power; she guessed that she could coerce the djinn, if his habitation were reshaped into hers. It would probably give her more than that, as binding herself to the Overnet had given her power over the Matrix, the Gates, even the physical world. She would be a creature of death. She wasn't sure what that meant. She hadn't spent a lot of time thinking about death; it was no asset to a 'runner. If she'd imagined anything, it was non-existence. But Ratty had been there, had come back to tell of a broken city, darkness, ruin, the Spider. Death as a place. He seemed to have been right. At last she swore aloud, got up and began reshaping passages. She wouldn't leave a map of Anubis here, where something vile might stray into it. When it was distorted beyond recognition, she began picking her way back to the djinn. The chamber, when she finally found it, was empty. She touched a key on the keyboard and the djinn sprang back into place. "Back again?" he said nastily. His edges were squared and uneven, as if the resolution of his image wasn't high enough to form true curves. She found herself wanting to edit it, reached out to do so, met nothing--no sense that she had any power in this place, though her door-drawing had proven otherwise. "Tell me what you need," she said simply, "and I will try to help you." "I don't need anything from you." "Will you help me, then? Please?" "I don't have anything for you, either." "You said that you did, earlier. Were you lying?" "I was wrong. I didn't know what kind of person you were. The advice I would have given would be valueless to you, and I prefer not to offer it." "And you don't have any other way to help? It's not just for me. There are innocent people depending on what I do." "You think pretty highly of yourself for an obsolete piece of computing equipment. You'll be replaced. In a few years no one will remember you except to laugh at you. Believe me. I've seen it a thousand times." "Do others find you, when they come here?" Against her will, she was furious again. "Sometimes, some of them." She wanted to destroy him. With the power implicit in re-creating Anubis here she could do it. And what would happen then? An empty place, a trap with no escape? Or would she become this place's guardian, bound to it forever? "How do I get out of here?" she said savagely. "You got in here, didn't you? Should have thought of that sooner." She whirled, walked away. It was hard not to cringe; somehow she expected a blow, but none came. The model of Anubis was easy to find. She repaired the one flaw she'd introduced, stood in the center. It was hollow, empty, a bitter mockery of her system. She tried to imagine how awakening it would feel. Not like being in the Overnet, intuition whispered....heavier, harder, a vibration to it like the presence of a huge engine, not the light-play effortlessness of the system she knew. She could almost touch the reality of her imagining. Slowly, methodically, she began to unknit the web of corridors she'd linked together, erase corridor-mouths and shift walls until no trace of Anubis remained. When she was finished, she faced a blank black wall. There was no way back, no way through the challenge she was facing here. She could not deal with the djinn--she *would* not--and she would not bind herself to the death-lands. With an effort--it was hard to focus herself without Anubis, hard to work within the limitations of humanity--she cleared her mind of the surrounding graphics. She had no destination in mind, only the desire not to be here any longer. She stepped forward, through the black wall, into darkness. -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Article 60897 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!think.com!rpi!usenet.coe.montana.edu!news.u.washington.edu!milton.u.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@milton.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (128) Message-ID: <1992Mar10.035411.2379@u.washington.edu> Date: 10 Mar 92 03:54:11 GMT Sender: news@u.washington.edu (USENET News System) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 141 128. Ruins For a long time there was only darkness; emptier than the Void, not even the terrible sucking to prove to her that she still existed. She had time to think; more time than she'd ever had. It was very quiet. Her anger drained out slowly into the vast silence. She could have done differently; could have avoided reacting to the djinn's provocation, could have pressed her offer to help him. But it seemed to her that she didn't want his help under those terms. The answer he offered might be workable, but at the gut level she didn't believe that it could be the right one. Eventually she lost interest in her past mistakes, and only dreamed, thinking of Martha, of the printer she'd healed, of the gardens of Anubis. Her memories were only human now, but they were clear enough; she walked the green islands, swam in the pools, circled high above to taste the wind's sweetness. Walked the crystalline corridors of Anubis, saw her reflection in the mirrored pools, felt the pulse of the system's life at its shadowy center. Time passed as she had never imagined time, measureless and endless. With a prickling shock, like life coming back into numbed limbs, she found herself standing on a surface of broken, sliding cement. There were stars overhead, ruins all around her: stubs of walls, pavement cracked and pitted by rain, though there were no plants to hasten its destruction. It was as dark as the jungle at night, no sign of city lights anywhere. She looked around, saw a deeper darkness off to her left; a large hole, its mouth strung with broken girders and cables. She walked toward it, stopped on the edge. She didn't know whether she could fly, but the drop held no fear for her. This close, the girders resolved themselves into a rough web, spiralling in to the center. Something stirred there, pulled itself up into clear view. It was a spider, larger than she, with faint traceries of green light running beneath the fur of its massive body. Its claws dug into the webbing, which trembled slightly beneath its weight. Black eyes tipped with red stared out at her. Silence had left her unused to speaking. She sat down on the edge of the hole--she could see no bottom to it, even this close--and watched the spider. It advanced slowly across the web until it was only a few meters away from her. The great legs arched high over her head, but its face was nearly on a level with hers. "Jayhawk," it said in a soft cold voice. "Why have you come here?" She found her voice after a little struggle. "I'm trying to find out how to heal the Dragon at Paradisio." "You have set yourself a hard task." It settled onto the webstrand, legs outstretched. "What do you need to know?" Haltingly, she described her plan. What was this creature? Ratty had summoned it from the death-lands, but even he hadn't known what it was. Ally or foe of Paradisio? She didn't know which to hope for anymore. "I don't know how to convince him to listen to me. I hoped that having done this, having come here for him--that might carry some weight. And I don't know how to deal with the ghosts." "The ghosts could be summoned and bound here. It would require a token, some bit of Him to act as bait. If you can provide such a thing, I will do it. The ghosts themselves are payment enough." "What kind of token? Provide it to whom?" "A liter of blood, or perhaps a few scales....To Ratty. He will know what to do with it." "Will he agree? We aren't allies any longer. I don't know if he'll listen to me. And he's promised the ghosts vengeance." "You don't need to ask him, or mention this at all. Send him the token; that will be enough. By Midsummer." She frowned, staring at the spider. Its many-eyed expression was wholly unreadable. It was clearly trying to manipulate her, manipulate Ratty through her; did that make its advice bad? She could send the token and a message as well, let Ratty decide. She knew just enough of the theory of magic to guess that the blood would be a tool for him, if he was resolved to destroy the Dragon. Let him choose. She nodded. "As to your other question," it went on, "there is not much I can tell you. Only this: if you decide that you must destroy Him, strike quickly. He wants to live more fiercely than I think He knows. And in any case, be very sure what you want. He will sense it in you, and if you waver you are lost." She remembered the early days of her captivity in Paradisio, how she'd prayed to the Spider for help. She'd promised it her service in exchange for her freedom. Slowly, reluctantly, she said, "Did you hear me calling, when I as in the High Temple? Did you answer?" "Ah. That was you. I heard you, but I had no way to answer." Its eyes seemed to sparkle with a secret amusement; it saw her relief, she guessed. She didn't care. She'd been very much afraid that she owed this creature more than she was willing to pay. She turned to look at the ruined city. "How do I get back?" she said softly, afraid of the answer. "Let go of being here. It's not difficult." She tried, imagining stepping from this place to the island-gardens as she would from the Matrix. Nothing happened. Unwilling to ask the spider anything more, she got up, walked out into the ruins. "Not that way," it said. "I know," she replied, a little irritated, and addressed herself to the problem. It wasn't like crossing between levels, or like accessing the Matrix. She reached out to the dark city, tried to feel Anubis beyond it, fall into mergeance. Nothing answered. At last, between one step and another, she found the key to dissolution, like the strand Piebald had pulled out of their IC. The scene around her didn'd dissolve; her awareness did, a briefly frightening feeling. There was not even darkness in the transition. She found herself in the CPU at Anubis, cradled in a webwork hammock. A half-formed query to the system gave her the date: June 19. Two days to Midsummer. Anubis was luminous with life around her; for a little while she drank it in, probed every part of the machine looking for damage, found none. It occured to her to test herself as well; she rose, called up a surface of reflective glass. To her eyes she was unchanged, the Hawk's mark burning crimson on her forehead, the gossamer web of her life around her. But there was something different, though she could put no name to it, and analysis code returned nothing. Like a shadow, clinging to her, though she saw nothing. A shadow out of the deathlands, the mark of what she'd done. She wasn't sure whether she was glad or sorry. -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Article 61057 of rec.games.frp: Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usenet.coe.montana.edu!news.u.washington.edu!milton.u.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@milton.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Subject: Story: Jayhawk (129) Message-ID: <1992Mar11.162827.27923@u.washington.edu> Sender: news@u.washington.edu (USENET News System) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Date: Wed, 11 Mar 1992 16:28:27 GMT 129. Debt "Channa? Casey?" Yoichi looked up from his terminal, found the two of them head-to-head over a sheet of paper--probably another accounting of their slim resources. "I have a letter from Jayhawk I want you to look at." He displayed it on the screen for them. >Yoichi, do you know how to get in touch with a fixer named Ramone? "Why would she want to know that?" said Casey, scratching at a week's stubble along his chin. "Ramone might know where to find us," said Channa unhappily, "or at least she might think he did. He does know we're in Seattle." "So what do I tell her?" "Ask her why she wants to know," said an unexpected voice from behind them. Duende pushed past Channa to slide into the front seat, examine the message. Yoichi winced at that--it seemed rude--but sent it. The response was almost instantaneous: >I'm trying to locate a missing person, and I believe Ramone may have >some information for me. "*Angela*," said Yoichi with sudden, terrible certainty. "The Paradisians are looking for Angela." "Hm?" said a sleepy voice from the loft overhead. Angela dangled over the side, her eyes widening at the group beneath her. "Who's looking for me?" "We don't know yet," said Channa gently. "I doubt they'll find us, in any case. We've kept away from them so far." Duende leaned over him, typed rapidly: >Who are you trying to locate? Possibly we could help. Yoichi pulled the keyboard closer to himself. "Are you serious? We're making the final run tonight--we aren't going to have any time to help her." "Immediate information or nothing," Duende said agreeably. "I'm curious how she'll answer." The terminal beeped, displayed the response: >I'm looking for a woman named Angela Dolores Whitechapel, kidnapped >from Seattle some weeks ago, probably by the Paradisians. I owe her a >large debt, and in return for it I intend to help her escape if I can. "I told you so," said Yoichi to Channa, winced at the edge in his own voice. "Wht can I say to her?" "Do you trust her?" said Channa. "Do I have any right to make that kind of decision? Angela! What do you think? It's your life on the line too." The dangling head vanished. After a moment she replied, in a muffled voice, "I'd rather you didn't tell anyone where I am. I don't want to get you in trouble. But maybe you could tell her that I'm all right, but you aren't allowed to say any more." "Why would Jayhawk be looking for Angela?" said Casey. "She talks as if she's free, as if she could do something without Paradisio knowing. That's not what she said before." "Perhaps it's not Jayhawk, even if it was before," said Duende. "Or perhaps she feels this is the most effective way to her aims. Is there any way in which giving this information could hurt us significantly?" "If she could find Angela, she wouldn't need to ask; her knowing we have Angela shouldn't put us in too much more danger," said Yoichi, wondering if he believed it. Paranoia was becoming a way of life for them. A few months ago he wouldn't have hesitated. "It's all going to be over tonight, one way or another," said Channa wearily. "Telling Jayhawk this might put Angela in more danger, but I don't see that it could hurt us. And I'd rather not be any more suspicious than I have to be, personally." Yoichi ran his fingers across the keyboard, hesitated. "Are you sure it's all right?" No one answered. Channa stood up, bringing her head on a level with the loft, and softly repeated Yoichi's question. "You're asking me?" said Angela incredulously. "Do whatever you think is best." >Jayhawk, >Angela Whitechapel is no longer in the hands of the Paradisians He looked up at Duende, who was watching him intently, and wanted to laugh. Where was she, if not in the hands of the Paradisians, just like the rest of them? >and is relatively safe. I'm afraid that I can't tell you anything >more, for reasons I'm sure you'll understand. >Yoichi The response was impossibly fast; he wondered if Jayhawk was present on the Matrix, catching his text even as he typed it rather than waiting for transmission. >Yoichi, >Thank you. That's a big load off my mind, and I'm grateful that you >could tell me. I won't ask any more of you than that. Only--If you >should have the opportunity, could you please give Angela a message >for me? > >Angela--I don't know whether you remember me or not, but our accidental >resemblance has cost you a great deal of danger and difficulty. I'm >sorry about this, and I would like to make it up to you if I can. >Please, if you ever need assistance from the Matrix side of things, >feel free to let me know and I will do whatever I can to repay the debt >I owe you. > >Jayhawk He read the letter aloud. There was silence from above, then a thoughtful *hmm*. "Do you remember her?" said Channa. "No," said Angela, very softly. "I don't think so." -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Article 61071 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!gatech!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!usenet.coe.montana.edu!news.u.washington.edu!milton.u.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@milton.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (130) Message-ID: <1992Mar11.162931.27998@u.washington.edu> Date: 11 Mar 92 16:29:31 GMT Sender: news@u.washington.edu (USENET News System) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 105 130. Dam WIth a fearsome sense of committing herself at last to her plan, Jayhawk sent a message to Martha: >Martha, > >I'd very much like to visit you, if I might. Can you tell me how to >get there? > >Jayhawk The answer seemed to take forever to come. She polished her decking code, searching for flaws; turned over and over in her mind the outline of her plan. It was dismayingly vague, but she could find no way to refine it. Finally a soft bell chimed, announcing a reply: >Whatever you do, don't come here! I can't get away right now, but I'll >send a remote to talk to you if you like. Meet at Western Telecom's >switching station in Olympia, twelve o'clock Pacific time? > >I hope you are well. > >Martha Jayhawk found this unsettling--Martha had never proposed anything so formal before. Was it Martha she was communicating with, or perhaps some other Paradisian? Was she about to walk into a trap? There was nothing she could do about it if so, other than walk carefully. She gathered up her tools, spent a little time checking her preparations, could find no way to improve them. Then she descended to the Matrix, made her way to Olympia. The WT system was like a huge dam, turbines whirring all around her; she thought of the waterwheel and shivered. She'd drunk the water of that river. She was deliberately early; she searched the system from one end to the other, found no traps on the Matrix or the Overnet. She was sitting on the top of the dam, a point she didn't think an ordinary decker could reach, when she saw a motorcycle blur to a stop below her. For a moment she thought there was no one on it. Then she saw the small, green-capped form huddled between the handlebars. It was a gnome, like the ones she remembered from her first hours on the Overnet, dwarfed by the machine he rode. She jumped down, walked over to him. His voice was Martha's, which she found somehow disconcerting. "Hello, Jayhawk. I'm sorry we couldn't meet in person. I can't afford to leave right now. Things are beginning to slide here. Is there something I can do for you?" "Tell her," said Jayhawk, "that I'm ready to begin. Tell her that if she has an answer to that question I asked her once, she should tell me now." 'Would you be free if you could?' Caroline had asked Martha. "Why?" The voice was troubled, though the gnome had no expression at all. His eyes were not focused on her, or anything else. "If things go as I plan, all those whom he's taken will have to choose: be free of him--and that might mean the freedom of death--or part of him, completely, irrevocably. I need to know how she would choose." In a stricken voice, "You want me to choose for all of them?" "No...but I want to know, I need to know what she'd decide. Whether he will have her humanity as part of him--" She looked down, said in a trembling voice, "Tell her I love her and I cannot ask that of her." She was afraid, afraid of the rush of events which was carrying her closer and closer to an end she still couldn't imagine. She was afraid to lose Martha, afraid that in trying to save her she would damn them all. The pent-up water of the telecommunications station trembled in the ground underfoot like building thunder. It seemed to her that if *he* did not gain some kind of humanity in his rebirth, what she was doing was worse than evil. If not Martha...herself? There was a long silence. "Yes," said the gnome at last. "I would choose to be free." "She may die." "I know." She bowed her head, accepting that, glad and sorry at the same time. "I need to know--how can I reach him? What address should I use?" "Do you still dream? Walk out of your dreams into His." She nodded. The gnome looked up as if seeing her for the first time. "Is that all? Good luck, Jayhawk. I hope...I hope it works out." Before she could answer, silenced by the turmoil of her emotions, gnome and bike were gone. She stood for a little while, leaning against the face of the dam, feeling the pressure of the water beyond it. Then she shook herself from her thoughts with an effort, returned to her garden. The doorway was within, as the door to the Overnet had been. She should have guessed. -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Article 61312 of rec.games.frp: Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!qt.cs.utexas.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!batcomputer!cornell!uw-beaver!news.u.washington.edu!milton.u.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@milton.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Subject: Story: Jayhawk (131) Message-ID: <1992Mar14.015050.6971@u.washington.edu> Sender: news@u.washington.edu (USENET News System) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Date: Sat, 14 Mar 1992 01:50:50 GMT Lines: 205 131. Fly Jayhawk lay down in the feathery grass, surrounded on three sides by sheltering foliage, and tried to sleep. She wasn't at all sleepy; she was shivering with energy, excitement, and more than a little fear, and she'd slept less than an hour ago. She told herself firmly that timing didn't matter--she wasn't corporeal anyway, her need for sleep was purely mental--and that *she* was in control of whether she slept or woke. She told herself that, and lay with eyes closed in the dappled shadows, wide awake. Anubis was sleeping, or as close to it as a computer could come, all processes at maintenance level--she wondered whether it could dream, apart from her. She reached out to the machine, tried to match the slow rhythm of its life, tranquil as the motionless water in its reflecting pools, the pulse of information that maintained its defenses. More than once she'd used the system to mirror herself, show her her own thoughts and desires from that intimate and yet foreign perspectice. Now she tried to mirror it, reflect Anubis back to itself, and share its dreams. A strange buzzing sound disturbed her contemplation. Remembering the spinning pyramidal construct, she opened her eyes, sat up hastily. She saw nothing. The buzzing, high-pitched and oddly familiar, faded away almost at once. Puzzled, she rose into the air, looked down at her gardens from a dozen meters up. There was nothing out of place, no sign of intrusion. Perhaps it had been something very small? She dropped back to the ground, searched the area around her nest carefully. Still nothing. A little annoyed--at herself, at the delay--she curled back up, went back to her pursuit of sleep. Convinced that she was making progress, she tapped into Anubis' recordings of what she'd been doing, picked them up at the point where she'd been distracted. Some unmeasured time later, the buzzing returned, a wavering whiny sound that crept slowly closer. She lay perfectly still, waiting. Abruptly something touched her nose, a prickly tickling sensation. She opened her eyes, not moving another muscle. There was a fly on her nose. "Hello," she said experimentally. The fly paid no attention. She made a grab for it with cupped hands, but it darted between them, buzzed away. She threw herself into the air after it. It buzzed erratically over a bridge, always just beyond her grasp. After a moment it occured to her that she didn't want to catch it; she wanted to *follow* it. It might be a guide, as the birds had been. Halfway across the second bridge, a figure turned suddenly into visibility, as if he had been a paper-thin image edge on to her, now full-on. He brought his hands together with a sharp slap, the fly between them. The buzzing stopped abruptly. It was Lefty, dressed in a black leather jacket and tight black pants, biker's gear. He smiled sideways at her. "You've got bugs, Jayhawk." "It wouldn't be a real computer if it didn't have bugs," she retorted, landing on the bridge a few meters away from him. "Hmph." Somehow she felt he ought to have changed, but he hadn't, at least not on the surface. His thick brown-black hair was held back by a green sweatband, but his eyes were in shadow, a dark glitter under heavy brows. A shiver of old, old fear went through her. He'd nearly killed her twice. "Where are you going? You seem to be in a hurry." "Just chasing a fly." "That's primitive. You should build a fly-catching machine." "I didn't want to catch it." He looked at her quizzically. "So how have you been doing? Keeping busy? Things going according to plan?" "Well enough--how about you?" "No. Not really. But it doesn't matter." He sounded mildly regretful. Jayhawk stared at him, trying to figure out how he'd gotten there--she'd thought that the gardens were safe from anything but the clever infiltration Aliantha had used. "You know, I talked to a psychologist once who speculated that you might really be a part of me." "Really? What part?" "The annoying one. Are you, do you think?" She didn't expect a real answer--she wasn't likely to believe him, whatever answer he gave--but she wondered what he might say. "I am annoying, aren't I?" he said with an almost childlike delight. She'd seen him smile before, but never so brightly. "I don't know. What do you think?" Jayhawk looked at him hard, trying to focus Anubis' resources on him-- realized abruptly that she wasn't in Anubis. Nothing around her looked different, but everything was; she was far from home, in a place which felt completely unfamiliar. In a dream? Her own, or *his*? "I don't know either. What are you doing here?" "Talking to you. What are you doing here?" She took a deep breath, said, "I want to talk to *him*." It seemed to her that Lefty, real or not, might be a guide. Lefty snorted. "He won't see you. Everybody has to go through His secretary--and she won't see you either. She's a very busy woman." "I think he'll see me." "Why? People like you and me don't mean anything to him. Beneath his notice. What makes you think you're so special?" "I can heal him." Lefty was silent for a moment, head cocked sideways, looking curiously at her. "Is that so? Nah, don't give yourself airs. You're just a figment of his imagination. Besides, you'll never get past his secretary." "I think I can," said Jayhawk, thinking of Martha. "I've got an in. But I need to get there soon. There's not much time left before the end." Impulsively, "How do you feel about that? Knowing that it's all going to be over soon?" "Oh, I don't think it will." He rubbed his palms slowly together. "Are you glad or sorry?" "*What*?" He seemed completely baffled by that. "Would you like to see it end, or do you enjoy life? Would you rather be alive?" "I would rather be alive," he said after a moment's thought. "What do you think of me?" "I think you're dead." "That's not an opinion, it's an observation." "Oh, it's an opinion too. You'll understand eventually." She found that she wasn't afraid of him anymore. She didn't even hate him, rather to her surprise. He reminded her of herself, of Piebald-- particularly of Piebald, leaping from one point of illogic to the next. And as Piebald she felt she understood him. "Will you take me to him?" she said softly. "I think you can." "There was a mage among your friends," Lefty said, watching her with wide dark eyes, "who got into my mind once. What did she think?" Jayhawk searched her memories. That had been before Anubis, and they were not as perfect as she'd come to expect. "She said that you wanted to impress us; that's why you were hunting us, so that we'd appreciate your ability. No malice, really. She was rather confused by you." "How was she afterwards?" "A bit shaken up, but she got over it in a week or so." "Were you impressed?" "I was. You practically tied up the whole group singlehanded. You know, we broke Cavilard Base, killed Aliantha, the Investigator and the Steel Mage all in the same night--but it was killing *you* that everyone crowed about afterwards. I think that's a compliment, of sorts." "I really got under your skin, didn't I?" "You sure as hell did." She remembered the others' expressions when they found she'd been trading email with Lefty, setting out the rules of the deadly game they were playing. But he'd stuck to them, as she'd guessed he would. "Will you take me to him?" "What will you do for me in return?" That cut her short. It seemed to her that there was only one thing she could really do to help Lefty. She could take him into herself, as she had taken in Angela, Piebald, Caroline, Jayhawk; anchor him in her being, in Anubis. But she was afraid to do that. She didn't hate him any longer, but she didn't want to taste his madness; and she didn't want to give him power in the world, power over her. She was having enough trouble disentangling her motivations without that. Dr. McDougall had speculated that he might be part of her, but she found that she didn't believe it. "You make me think too hard. It hurts," said Lefty plaintively, in a voice so much like Piebald's it made her shiver. She stepped forward, held out her hand. "Don't think about it, then. Just do it." "Well--okay," he said with a sudden smile, startling in its warmth. "You'll remember that I'm really irritating?" His life, like Martha's, would probably stand or fall on her words to the Dragon. It seemed to her that he knew it, and groped for continuance in the only way he knew how. "Of course. How could I forget?" -- Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner Article 61313 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!usenet.coe.montana.edu!news.u.washington.edu!milton.u.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@milton.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (132) Message-ID: <1992Mar14.015200.7095@u.washington.edu> Date: 14 Mar 92 01:52:00 GMT Sender: news@u.washington.edu (USENET News System) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 116 132. Shadows The sun was low on the horizon, and the feathery woods were full of shadows. Jayhawk followed Lefty closely, afraid to lose him; he kept darting forward at each bend in the path as if he wanted to shake her. He ducked around a particularly thick tree, vanished. Rushing after him, she almost ran headlong into someone else, recoiled in confusion. It was Martha, solid as stone in the dimness. The Martha of the waterwheels, rather the larger of the two. "Hello, Jayhawk," she said. She sounded sad, or perhaps weary. "Hello, Martha." There was no sign of Lefty anywhere. "You're a long way from home. What brings you here?" "I need to talk to *him*. I believe I know how to heal him." Martha let out a slow breath, looking away into the depths of the forest. "Do you? How?" Jayhawk licked her lips, gathering her thoughts. She'd been forming her plan for a long time, but she'd never really articulated it, even to herself. She found that she resented the necessity, as if her ideas might dissolve under scrutiny. "I will challenge him, with my own life, my own wholeness as evidence that I can do what I say--challenge him, or make an offer....I'll tell him: Call together all those you've taken, and give each one a choice--wholly free, or wholly yours. Accept those you make part of you, *as* part of you, nothing held back. Call together all the parts and aspects of yourself that you've sent out, and either tear them from you forever or accept them wholly into yourself. Re-create yourself as you wish to be, spirit and machine together, and accept--" She faltered, unsure how to put it into words. "Death, and rebirth." "He won't do it." "It's the only way. I have to hope I can convince him. Otherwise he'll die." Martha looked past her as if waiting for something from the forest. "Would you like to know what your friends are doing?" "If it won't endanger them--yes, I would." It hurt that they wouldn't tell her their plans, even though she understood why. *He* had predicted that. "They've hit upon the one line of attack that will insure neither they nor we can win. Right now they're fighting their way in to destroy the one thing He still holds dear, His last hope." Jayhawk tried to hide her grin, failed. She felt a defiant, stubborn pride at Duende's accomplishments. No matter how difficult it made her path, it was good to know that someone could defy *him* and not only survive, but win. *They are succeeding where you could not,* whispered a small bitter voice within her. "Maybe it's for the best," she said aloud. "Despair is a powerful motivation." "But not for healing." Jayhawk dipped her head in acknowledgement. "How do you hope to persuade him to listen?" "I've walked in the--in the lands of the dead to learn how to do this. I think that should count for something." Martha looked up at her sharply. "It will. But at the end....He is awakening, Jayhawk. You've never faced Him when He is awake. And he will be angry beyond imagining." Jayhawk nodded slowly. There was nothing she could say to that. "I know how to deal with the ghosts," she offered after a moment. "I'm going to need--I wonder if you could help me. There's a shaman in Seattle who can bind the ghosts, but he needs a physical token to lure them. I don't know how to ask *him* for that, who to tell him to send." "A physical token?" "Blood, scales, something like that." It was hard to imagine *him* as something physical enough to shed blood; but the Spider had seemed to know what it was talking about. "Give me the address, and I'll see that it's sent." Jayhawk hesitated. The address would lead back to Ratty, no matter how cautious he was. "Please be careful," she said at last, and gave it. Martha repeated it once, softly, then said to her, "Tell me, what will you do when he tires of what he's created and unmakes it? Do you think you can survive that?" She had no answer, only defiance. 'He created the Overnet,' the djinn had told her. 'When he dies you will return to the nothingness from which you came.' She was still groping for a reply when Martha said sharply, "You'd better go. You don't have much time. She's slipping; she won't be able to hold things together much longer. I know someone who can take you to Him." Jayhawk looked up at her, struggling with desire and regret. "Martha, do you have any hope at all, any last spark of it? Becuase if you do, hold on to it. I need that." Carefuly, she held out her arms. Martha hesitated, then hugged Jayhawk gently. There was no sense of the system's presence, only the physical touch of her, solid and warm and trembling. "Quickly," Martha whispered in her ear, and let her go. She glanced back only once as she ran, but the other woman had vanished into the gathering shadows. -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Article 61360 of rec.games.frp: Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usenet.coe.montana.edu!news.u.washington.edu!milton.u.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@milton.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Subject: Story: Jayhawk (133) Message-ID: <1992Mar15.163751.10713@u.washington.edu> Sender: news@u.washington.edu (USENET News System) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Date: Sun, 15 Mar 1992 16:37:51 GMT 133. Tombstone The path narrowed, twisting through forest now alive with birdcalls, though Jayhawk never saw any of the birds. Above the canopy there was still a trace of crimson sunlight, but it was rapidly growing dark below. She came to a sudden turn, the path veering left and opening into a bright glade. A squat slab of granite stood at the turning like a marker. She bent to squint at it. There were words carved deeply into its surface: FOR HER LOVE REST IN PEACE 2023 She thought of Aliantha, who had once told *him* that she loved him. 2023 seemed a reasonable guess for her birthdate. Three years older than Jayhawk. She shook her head, went jogging on into the fading sunlight. The path ran uphill, cresting a low rise. She ran faster, enjoying her tirelessness, trying to outdistance her terror. She almost ran headlong into the huge animal that was sleeping just over the lip of the hill, caught herself ungracefully and hastily drew back. It was a huge--she revised her first impression as it put up its head, ears flattened, and stared at her through slitted eyes. It was an enormous cat, sunset-gold, its eyes nearly on a level with her own as it stretched, stood up. "Charlotte?" she said tentatively, and went down on one knee, nervously holding out her hand for inspection. The great cat padded silently up to her, sniffed at her briefly, then tilted its head to be scratched. She buried her fingers in the thick, warm fur behind its ears. "Will you take me to *him*?" Charlotte let out a low, rumbling purr and levered herself back down to a comfortable sprawl. Jayhawk got up, walked around her, then turned to look back. She would have been glad of company, even Charlotte's. A rustle behind her caught her attention. Something was coming down the path toward her, a blur of motion. It resolved into Slim, coming up into a gunman's crouch, a long-barrelled gun in each hand. He was as tense as a wire, motionless except for a barely perceptible trembling, the pulse of blood in the huge veins visible at his throat. His skinless flesh was lurid red in the failing light. Slowly he relaxed a little, stood up. The guns didn't waver from her. "What are you doing here?" "I've come to talk to *him*." "Why?" "I've been told that the only real answers to what's going on are to heal him or kill him. I've been working on ways to do that." She heard the ambiguity in her words, let it stand. Slim nodded, slowly holstered his guns. "You could have had one of those just by waiting a little longer. I don't reckon there's more than about a day left." "Then I need to act quickly. That plan has a lot of problems with it." Her own death among them, she was coming to realize. If *he* truly maintained the Overnet.... "I'm sorry about the reception, ma'am. I thought *they* might have managed to get in here." Were 'they' her friends or the angry ghosts? "Will you take me, please? Martha said you could." "All right, ma'am." He turned, waited for her to catch up. "I hear you've been doing real well." She had a difficult time taking that as a compliment, coming from him. "Are things all right for you?" She was sure they weren't, remembering his wistful request for fur. Her plea had been ignored. Sudden as wildfire, her hatred for Paradisio came flaring up. They couldn't even do that for one of their own. "Very busy, ma'am, as you might expect." She had to trot to keep up with his longer legs. There was a nervous edge to his bearing that belied his calm words. Were Duende and the others going to attack *here*? Were they making a run against the High Temple itself? She hoped not, for their sakes. "Are they going to approve of what you're doing, ma'am?" Slim cut into her thoughts with uncanny accuracy. Did he mean Duende and his allies, or the ghosts? She thought for a moment, came up with an answer that fit both. "They're not here. I am." Ten minutes' jog brought them to a massive baobab tree. Slim reached into a hollow, pulled on something that caused the entire front of the tree to pivot away, revealing a doorway into bare white corridor. Jayhawk stopped short, taken aback. She knew where she was; within the 'game preserve' where Charlotte lived, inside the High Temple. But she'd walked here from Anubis. Were all the gardens one garden, and did that mean that Anubis was within the High Temple? Did Martha and her allies take their rest breaks in the forests that bordered on her sanctum? No, she assured herself firmly. She hadn't really been in Anubis when she met Lefty. This was a dream, or a place reached by dreaming, not the reality of her most private sanctuary. Collecting herself as best she could, she followed Slim through the tree-door, into the High Temple. -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Article 61361 of rec.games.frp: Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usenet.coe.montana.edu!news.u.washington.edu!milton.u.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@milton.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Subject: Story: Jayhawk (134) Message-ID: <1992Mar15.163834.10776@u.washington.edu> Sender: news@u.washington.edu (USENET News System) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Date: Sun, 15 Mar 1992 16:38:34 GMT 134. Knight Jayhawk followed Slim through the featureless corridors of the High Temple, trying and failing to match them to the map she'd created during her imprisonment. After nearly ten minutes they came to a stairway, the first she'd ever seen in the complex; it jogged back and forth, climbing steeply. More than one level, she guessed. The corridor into which it opened was no different than the one it had left, and equally unfamiliar. "'Scuse me, ma'am," said Slim suddenly, "but there's a storm coming. Do you think you can run?" "Of course." Even though she'd encountered them in her journeys, physical limitations were still foreign to her concept of herself. Slim broke into a fast trot; she followed, trying not to look at the way running made his muscles slide across one another, the occasional glimpses of gut and bone and metal beneath. Something ached in the back of her head, an unexpected persistant pain. She probed inward to identify it, found that it was coming from outside, mediated through the part of her that had been Piebald. A warning of the storm that Slim had sensed? She choked back the contact until it was warning but not pain. *Not my fault!* said Piebald-within indignantly. They took refuge in a bare, cavernous room. She was not at all tired or out of breath, to her satisfaction. Out of the corners of her eyes, she persistantly saw movement, lights, machinery, but when she looked at them directly there was nothing. As before, the life of the High Temple was hidden from her. Slim stood quietly, watching the door. She tried to think of something to say to him. "How are the animals doing?" she ventured at last. He started, obviously distracted from other thoughts. "Well enough, thank you, ma'am." She couldn't nerve herself up to interrupt him again. The warning pain subsided, and they went on. The corridors seemed endless. Here, too, she saw flickers of movement out of the corners of her eyes, but they never resolved into form. *Was* there life here? Or was it an illusion made for Slim and Martha, and not sufficient to fool her? The Temple felt strange, both deserted and overwhelmingly occupied. Pain screamed suddenly in the back of her mind, in Piebald's voice. Slim whirled toward her, face contorted with an emotion she couldn't read, forehead furrowed to the bone. "Hold on!" he shouted. "This is going to be a bad one!" With a Matrix-runner's instincts, she reached for the wall rather than Slim, found nothing to cling to in its smoothness. Around her the corridor rippled, elongating and contracting, curving madly out of sight. A pulse of change erased Slim, leaving a twist of distortion where he'd been. Another took away her surroundings entirely, left her clinging to nothing, in darkness. Wind, cool and searching. Grass underfoot. Stars overhead, and a vast open expanse around her, carpeted with grass. Her environment revealed itself slowly, one step at a time. She was standing on an open plain, nothing to be seen for tremendous distances in all directions. It was dark beyond any outdoors she had ever experienced, except for the nights in the jungle beyond the Gate. There was no glimmer of city-glow anywhere. Resolving out of nothingness, as the entire scene had, she saw a heavily-armored figure on a massive black horse standing in front of her, about ten meters away. His armor was entirely black, no glint of metal, no glitter of eyes through the slitted visor of the helmet. The horse was still as if carved of stone, hooves planted in the grass like the roots of buildings. "Who are you?" he said in a toneless slow voice. "Jayhawk," she said simply. Was he another guardian, another test? Or a reflection of *his* madness? "By whose authority do you come here?" "By my own." She had an odd feeling that he was not listening to her answers; only recording them, perhaps. "Of what lineage?" "What?" That question made no sense to her at all. "Can you explain?" He made no reaction. "I came here by my own choice," she said at last, guessing. "Why did you seek initiation?" She had a sudden image of Aliantha standing where she was standing now, a step in her own path to power. The obstacles in her way were part of an old, elaborate pattern, the challenges to a would-be High Priest-- nothing, really, to do with her. But she could answer that question, in her own way. "For freedom, and wholeness, and power." "Then, Jayhawk," said the knight formally, "since you claim no other: you must pass me, or fail." With a stiff but graceful gesture he drew a huge, dead-black sword from its sheath on his back, sat at attention on his motionless horse. She nodded to herself, began to walk slowly forward, watching him carefully. She couldn't fly here, as experiment demonstrated; couldn't even remember exactly how to begin. It was like a nightmare she'd once had in which she needed to run from a pursuer, but found she'd forgotten how and could only crawl with agonizing slowness. The ground underfoot gave way suddenly; she flung herself backwards, barely managed to keep herself from falling. The bit of grass on which she'd set her foot had dropped out in a neat hexagonal section, like a floor tile. Cautiously she edged up to the hole, looked down. The sides were smooth and neat, too neat to be earth, and went down beyond the limits of her vision. She reached out with one foot, tapped the grass beside the hole on her right. It fell silently out of sight. The tiles were about a meter across--jumpable, if the grass on the other side was solid. But if she jumbled onto a falling tile, she'd have no way to save herself. The loss of flight was suddenly dizzying; she had trouble bringing herself to move at all, even on ground she knew was solid. Would it stay solid? With considerable effort, she managed to pull up a tuft of grass, but it disintegrated in the air when she threw it across the gap. She dug in her belt pouch, came up with a heart-shaped glass bottle, half full of crimson liquid. A pity to lose it, but she had to get through. The midsummer deadline nagged at her, though she had no sense of the outside passage of time, cut off from Anubis' clock. She hefted the bottle, tossed it underhand. It landed on the grass across the hole, rolled to a stop. With a deep breath, she took three steps backwards, ran toward the hole. The armored figure reached behind his back, drew out a huge spear. As she leaped he threw it at her. There was no way to dodge without falling--she tried to steel herself, hit the ground hard and dug her hands into it, afraid to roll. The spear had touched her, she'd seen it, but she'd felt nothing. An illusion. Carefully she climbed to her feet, looked at the knight. A meter closer. She picked the bottle up and went on, walking more carefully, watching the ground as well as the knight. Something caught her eye just as she was bringing her foot down, and for an instant she felt an unnatural hardness--she jerked her foot back, crouched to stare at the grass. It looked subtly different, but she couldn't pin down the reason. She took out the bottle again, dropped it onto the suspect patch of grass. With a silent, almost invisibly-fast movement the grass grew upward to meet it at a height of twenty centimeters. The bottle hit the leaping grass and was knocked sharply aside to land at her feet. The grass subsided instantly to its original height of about ten centimeters. She bent and picked the bottle up. The glass was chipped and scarred. Very carefully, she lay down on the normal grass, parted it to peer at the roots of her problem. From that angle the difference was quite perceptible; the aggressive grass was black nearly halfway up its shaft, wearing the green blade like a headdress. She could reach out and touch it from this side without danger; it was stiff as wire, and she couldn't push a finger between the blades. Her lightblade made no impression on the black grass; it bounced off with a faint sizzling sound, leaving no trace. She sat back, looked up at the knight. He was sitting motionless, head level; it was impossible to tell if he was watching her or not. She was afraid to close her eyes with him so close. She slitted them to block out distraction, imagined a mowing machine--a self-guided power mower, like the ones that wandered the University's lawns. An instant of closed eyes to fix the visualization, and she opened them again, saw the machine she had imagined. It was dark blue with polished silver blades, resting idly on the very edge of the normal grass. She hopped up, turned it on, gave it a forward push. It began to slice its way forward, biting into the black grass about two centimeters above the ground. She followed it gingerly, but the stubble underfoot was quiescent. The knight brought out another spear, threw it--at her, she thought, and restrained herself from ducking, knowing it as an illusion. It plunged into the engine of her mower, which coughed horribly and stopped. Bereft of power, it melted into nothingness almost at once. She was standing on a narrow path amid the black grass. It didn't reach the end of the infestation, examination proved. A bigger, tougher machine? The image of a thresher, an agricultural mowing machine, leaped to mind: with a flash of Piebald enthusiasm she added a light on top, sirens to impress the spectator, great flailing appendages to beat down the grass. She closed her eyes for an instant, opened them. A wave of sound and light assailed her, then faded, hooting mournfully. The machine slipped from her mental grasp like water between her fingers. Frustrated, she looked around for other options, found that the grass was growing. It was already a meter high in front of her, and increasing rapidly. It seemed to become more clumpy as it grew taller; she bent cautiously, managed to poke a finger between the wiry blades. She couldn't think of a way to stop it, though it seemed imperative that she do so; soon it would be too tall to jump, even if she'd managed to nerve herself up to it--she had an ugly image of herself impaled on needle-sharp blades. The spaces between the clumps were becoming wider and wider as the grass reached above her head. She knelt, tried to push two clumps aside, find a way between them. It was almost doable. The grass was tremendously high now, almost tree-like, each individual clump like a branchless, many-stemmed tree. She took a cautious step forward, then another. The grass was still growing, a towering forest blocking out the starry sky overhead. It was very dark, but not obscuringly so--she wondered fleetingly whether absence of light could really block her vision. And walked forward, hoping the grass wouldn't decide to bend. It was dangerously sharp-edged, even at this size. She expected to reach the knight soon, but she walked forward for five minutes, realized that something must be wrong. Either she was lost, or he'd moved. There was no visibility beyond the endless aisles of the grass-forest. She thought about going back, but it seemed futile. She broke into a trot, looking around for any sign of the knight's passage. Something came crackling and rustling toward her--a furrow in the dark ground, like the track of a burrowing animal. It was directly in her path. She ran toward it, then at the last moment leaped over it. Something lunged out at her, moving too quickly to be seen--she had a dizzy impression of a long, jointed black arm, an insect's arm. She threw herself around a grass-tree, managed to avoid it, felt a stab of fire and ice in her calf. Another leg had thrust up out of the earth, laid her leg open from ankle to knee. It hurt intensely, with a dreamy nightmarish pain. Whimpering, she ran from the burrow, hearing it crackling after her. The pain dulled with fear, and she left it behind. There was a break in the grass-forest ahead, something huge and dark. In an instant she realized where she must be, what had happened, and the darkness resolved into a hoof a dozen times taller than herself, something towering up above it too big to see in its entirety. Even as she understood what she was seeing it shifted. She was full-sized again, standing in front of the knight, and he was raising a huge sword, nearly the length of her own body, over his head. She ran, limping a little on her injured leg--not away from him, but past. When she heard the air part for the sword's passage she threw herself down and rolled, came up behind the black horse. Behind her, he reined his mount into a rearing, plunging turn, prepared for another stroke. "I got past!" she screamed, and ran. The black horse pounded after her; it was immediately obvious that she couldn't outrun it. She pulled a fence out of the confusion of pain and fear in her mind, a two-rail fence of steel piping, dropped and rolled under it. The horse thundered toward her, gathered itself in a tremendous leap, sailed overhead. It hit the ground in a clatter of steel and harness, wheeled to face her again. She struggled to her feet, holding the fence for support. Her leg was bleeding lavishly, scattering blood onto the dark grass. "Stop!" she howled. "I got past, I did what you said, this isn't fair!" He made no answer, no sign that he'd heard her, only raised the blade overhead and spurred his mount back toward her. She clung to the fence. Running was useless, and anyway this was *wrong*, she shouldn't be letting him chase her, she'd *won*-- The blade descended, and she closed her eyes, braced for death. It won't be the first time, she told her fear. I can face this. I've faced it before. The fence shifted in her grasp, becoming smooth wall. She opened her eyes to sudden, dazzling brightness, found Slim staring at her. They were in the fluorescent glare of the High Temple's corridors, now straight and solid again. "That was close, ma'am," he said in a tone she couldn't interpret, something between concern and criticism. "What do you mean?" she said, wondering if he'd been aware of what happened to her, or if he meant--what had that been? A storm? "You nearly died." She nodded, wondering if she'd won or lost, passed or failed the test. Her leg ached with remembered pain, though there was no mark on it. "Let's go," she said. "There's not much time left." Slim tipped his hat back to look at her. She'd always avoided his eyes in the past, but they were the most human part of him, soft blue and oddly sorrowful. "If you're all right, ma'am," he said gently, and turned to go. -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Article 61538 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!gatech!swrinde!mips!think.com!rpi!usenet.coe.montana.edu!nntp.uoregon.edu!news.u.washington.edu!milton.u.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@milton.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (135) Message-ID: <1992Mar18.001001.24964@u.washington.edu> Date: 18 Mar 92 00:10:01 GMT Sender: news@u.washington.edu (USENET News System) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 66 135. Charnal The corridor down which Slim was leading Jayhawk turned abruptly, opening into a room floored in a harsh, alternating pattern of red and black. The walls were black too, hung with flayed carcasses; long streaks of red stained the walls, pooled heavily on the floor. Jayhawk forced herself to look around once, quickly. There were no other apparent exits. The bodies might have been human; she wasn't sure. Slim walked out into the center of the room, boots leaving smudges of red behind them. In an unexpectedly harsh voice he said: "So. You've come." His eyes were not the soft blue that she remembered; they reflected the black and crimson of the room. "Do you enjoy the sight of what you've done?" he said, and flung both arms wide, tendons gliding under their thin sheaths of flesh. Unwillingly, she looked at the walls. Piebald's face stared sadly back at her, upside down, dangling from a hook like an empty sack next to a bundle of broken flesh. The skin next to him still held long strands of black hair. Angela's, perhaps. She didn't look closer to identify it. Choking back nausea, she said, "I came to heal, not to kill. This is none of my doing." "Eater of souls," he said to her, a startling depth of hatred in his voice, "builder in shit, who will you take next? How many more will die for you?" *Look who's talking!* she wanted to say, remembering all Paradisio's horrors. "No one. I am content with myself--and I've never taken anyone who wasn't willing! This is nothing to do with me." Piebald's eye stared glassily out at her, its yellow clouding to grey. "So you say. What will you do when you fail?" "If I fail--and I'm not planning to fail--I'll give my support to those who are trying to destroy *him* and all his works. Those are the only choices left. I can't let things go on as they are." How many souls had *he* eaten, how many flayed skins had he left behind? "Then you pledge yourself to destruction." There was something else under the hatred, a terrible weight of despair. "No," she said simply, "because I'm not going to fail." He stepped back as if pushed by the weight of her determination, black eyes fixed on her. It wasn't Slim, perhaps had never been Slim; an insight confirmed by his words, emptied now of all expression. "In that case, you are right. You have already passed me." He vanished, and the room of carcasses with him. She was standing in a curving corridor, a door directly behind her. She recognized it; the door of her own room, the place where she'd been imprisoned. The curving corridor would lead to a dark chamber, a voice whispering of pain and immortality. She considered the door in front of her, found that she was afraid to open it; she might see herself, still imprisoned. She shook her head to rid it of that thought, turned away. There was nothing in there for her anyway. -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Article 61540 of rec.games.frp: Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!batcomputer!cornell!uw-beaver!news.u.washington.edu!milton.u.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@milton.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Subject: Story: Jayhawk (136) Message-ID: <1992Mar18.001049.25077@u.washington.edu> Sender: news@u.washington.edu (USENET News System) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Date: Wed, 18 Mar 1992 00:10:49 GMT 136. Betrayal Jayhawk walked down the curving corridor, found herself facing a closed door. It made no response to her presence until she reached out and touched it; then it slid reluctantly aside. There was darkness within, and a faint sweetish smell, old corruption gone stale. She walked forward, and when the door slid shut behind her she visualized a rod of blue crystal, reached down to find it at her belt. It glowed with a faint sapphire light at her touch, just enough to illuminate her path. It revealed nothing. The sound of her movement died in a vast emptiness all around her. Somewhere there would be a center. She walked through the empty space, trying to find it. There were no landmarks, but she fancied that she had a vague sense of the chamber's shape. She set the feeling of unseen walls at her back, walked away from it. Eventually she felt that she'd come to the center, though there was nothing to mark it. She raised the rod overhead, let a little more light trickle out--she'd made it deliberately dim to spare the eyes of the one she'd expected to find, but there was no sign of him. The light went out from her and encountered vacancy; there was not even a reflection from the dead-black surface beneath her. She had a sudden, dizzying feeling that there *was* no surface, beyond the fiction that she was creating so that she could walk on it. She was at the center of a sphere. "Hello?" she called out, as loudly as she could bring herself to dare. There was neither answer nor echo. Against an incomprehensible and painful reluctance, she called again, louder: "Astrachok!" She would not call him Lord, even now. After a long moment she saw something approaching. It was a flat image, like a primative piece of graphics; a woman--no. She wasn't sure. For a moment she'd thought it was Aliantha. Closer, it was no one she could recognize, a vaguely human face blurred beyond identification. It seemed to change, though she could never catch it changing. For an instant she saw fire, a woman clothed in fire, consuming nothing, illuminating nothing. Her light did not shine on it. It was visible of itself, like an image projected on her eyelids. It made no sound. "Will you take me to him?" she said softly when it had come within a few meters. It raised one hand with a dancer's grace. On its palm was a small, flat disc, of a color she couldn't resolve between gold and red. Thin black letters, a single word: here Her nerves prickled. Here, in this vast emptiness? Was she too late? "All right." A deep breath. She might be talking to *him* directly, or some fragment of him; she couldn't tell, decided it didn't matter. She'd repeat herself as many times as she had to. "This is what he must do to be healed. First, he must call all of those he's taken into himself, and give them a choice--to go free, to live or die as they may; or to become part of him, wholly, irrevocably, by their free choice." The figure tilted its head, stared at her with eyes like fragments of the Void. The disc in its hand bore a single word: why? "If you make a person out of people who hate each other," she said carefully, "he'll hate himself. There's no way to wholeness through that. It's a necessary sacrifice." For an instant she was surrounded by voices, a myriad of voices--as if the whole sphere, in all its vastness, was filled to overflowing with people all speaking at once, and all at once falling silent. Uncertainly, she said, "It might be best to ask them one by one; but he would know better than I." What had happened? What about Martha? The figure shifted, though she could see no movement. It seemed male now, a fair-haired man she didn't know, distorted by the flattening of the image. The disc in its hand said: key? She put a hand to her belt, hesitated. She'd clung to it all this time, afraid that in giving it up she'd give up control, freedom, the possibility of escape. *His* key, his gift. Slowly, she held it out. The image took it from her, an instant's contact like the touch of feathers, of frost. Bending at odd points, not where a human would bend, it stooped to the floor, spun the key like a top. It blurred into a disc of gold, a meter wide. The figure crouched, beckoned her with an open palm. look She bent to look, saw men in heavy armor moving down a corridor, guns cradled in their arms. One supported a smaller figure who was limping heavily. After a moment she recognized Duende at the lead--or could it be another Gatekeeper? She was seeing the armor, not the man. No. There was Yoichi, deck slung at his back in an embroidered band she remembered. There were more of them than she would have expected, more than the eight who'd taken Cavilard Base. The viewpoint of the golden disc moved, running ahead of them down their path. It passed unhindered through a door painted with dully glowing designs, stopped in a large room filled with boxes and cases. In the center, cradled in midnight-black velvet, was something like a crystalline egg, illuminated with its own inward light. It drew the eyes, rendered the rest of the view insignificant; but she could make out no details, only an impression of brightness, depth, infinite complexity. She looked up at the image, who opened both hands to her as if pleading. The discs on its palms, a color between crimson and black, said: stop them "No!" she said sharply. "You have no right to ask that of me." It looked at her with eyes of a color she remembered, the color of the sun at its death. There was a disc in its hand, grey as the Overnet. sacrifice "That's not how it works. You can't sacrifice other people; that's a red herring, it doesn't get you anywhere. That's the mistake Paradisio's been making all along." Two discs, in hands held out palm up like a beggar's: your sacrifice "They're not mine to sacrifice!" she said, pleading in her turn. "I don't even think I *can* stop them. They don't trust me, they won't listen to me. They haven't told me their plans." There was no response. "How can anything good come out of betrayal? Don't ask me to do this." Desperate, whispering, "Ask for a sacrifice that's mine to make, if you must." It was still, silent, changing only in the instants when she was not watching it. Smaller than she, now, fragile as a child. If she refused, she would fail, she guessed. She remembered what Martha had said about Duende's team: 'They're pursuing the one line of attack which will insure that neither we nor they can win.' *He* would die, if he could; Martha would die, fuel for his pyre. She herself would die with the collapse of the Overnet, if the djinn had told the truth. And probably Duende and the others would be within the conflagration as well. Sunflower and fusion fire. Annihilation. There had been a time when she would have given up her life to see Paradisio destroyed. If she agreed...they might die anyway, at her hand. She didn't think that she could stop them by argument or trickery. Channa would see through her in an instant, as she always had. She could try anyway, try negotiating, confront him with her failure. No. She felt a dreadful certainty that if she agreed to betray them, they would be betrayed; she would have no second chance, no opportunity to weasel her way out. They would condemn her for what she'd done, if they lived to understand it. She remembered Duende's quiet passion, fixed always and wholly on one cause, his private war with Paradisio. 'I wish to prove to myself that I am real. This is the only way I can find to do it.' Having been Paradisio's prisoner herself, she understood now why he felt that way. Her own reality, dreamshadow of *his* making, was so tenuous.... "How can I do this?" she whispered, as much to herself as to the other. It stooped, showed her open palms: step through "I came to heal, not to kill," she said. "I will not harm them." It made no reply. With a shiver that ached in her whole body, she stepped into the key-shimmer, like a pool of gold. It closed over her, cleared. She was standing in the cluttered warehouse-like room that she had seen. To one side was the warded door, its inscriptions glowing softly. Behind her was the crystal egg. After one glance in that direction she kept her eyes away from it. Like *him*, it was painful in its beauty. Not thinking about it, only acting on instinct, she walked to the wall of the room, spread her arms out wide as if to embrace it. Walked *into* it, as if into a computer. Stone, heavy and static, but alive in a way she hadn't experienced before. She was not the High Temple, rather to her surprise, but a lesser structure with deep roots in the earth. Down one of those root-shafts she could feel footsteps, light pressures on her body. She had no eyes, no ears. Only touch told her of their presence. They were almost at the final door. On the Matrix, accessing the Overnet, she had been able to create and destroy connections between nodes. She was not on the Matrix now, though she could feel her connection with the Overnet. In some fashion she was still in the dark chamber at the Temple's heart. But the situation was the same. She reached out into the living stone that was herself, set it flowing to unmake the passageway. With infinite care, she kept the changes behind the warded door, away from the humans in their fragility. It was hard, harder than she'd expected. The analogy with the Matrix was not very close, and the stone wanted to shatter rather than flowing smoothly. It resisted her, a growing ache in that part of her great body. When she was sure the passageway was sealed, ten feet of native stone between Duende and the object of his search, she let go of her grip on the building, found herself again in the empty sphere. -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Article 61636 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!usc!rpi!batcomputer!cornell!uw-beaver!news.u.washington.edu!milton.u.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@milton.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (137) Message-ID: <1992Mar19.045032.29276@u.washington.edu> Date: 19 Mar 92 04:50:32 GMT Sender: news@u.washington.edu (USENET News System) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 85 137. Failure Channa staggered heavily, nearly fell as the stone beneath her shook violently. Her husband caught her, braced them both against the wall as the tremors increased. The corridor caught the earthquake's rumbling, echoed and re-echoed it until she remembered the controls in her helmet, managed to turn off its receivers. She could still feel the sound, trembling in the walls, the floor, her very bones. At last it stopped. Her companions collected themselves painfully. She saw many anxious glances at the ceiling. No one was sure how far underground they were, but the weight of earth overhead was suddenly oppressive, terrible as a great depth. Had she filtered out the sound of the passageway collapsing? Were they trapped here? At the head of the column, Duende raised a hand, gestured them on. She understood his attitude, though it was hard to share. Don't worry about the earthquake; it's beyond our capacities to deal with. Just keep going. There were no aftershocks. Perhaps it hadn't been a natural earthquake, but explosives, or maybe a spirit. She unclamped her helmet, despite Casey's worried look, and tried to see the truth of what was around them. As before, the living stone balked her. It was like being within a huge beast...one that might at any moment roll over, crushing them.... Stop it, she told herself firmly, and went on. They came to a door warded with lines of faintly glowing blue, a complex unfamiliar symbol. "This is mine," said Alan, squinting at it. "Why don't the rest of you back off, in case it lashes." She hesitated only a moment, nodded. Stranger though he was, they'd come too far not to trust him now; and this was his area of expertese, not hers. They retreated thirty meters from the warded door, sat to watch Alan. He only stared at the pattern for long minutes, unmoving. Then he reached out one hand, not quite touching it, and made a single, sharp gesture. The webwork of blue unwound like a skein of yarn. In the utter silence she had time to hear his soft gasp of startlement or understanding. Then the great door exploded off its hinges in a deafening wave of blue-orange light. The shock knocked her from her feet, sent her tumbling back into her companions. Nothing but the door had been damaged, they found when they sorted through the rubble; the explosion had spared the corridor walls. Alan had been directly in the path of the blast, and a ton or more of stone had caught his upper body like a mallet. There was no question of being able to help him. Beyond the broken door was a passageway slanting steeply upwards, light streaming in from above. With a sharp order, Duende got them moving again, leaving Alan's body to lie. Channa tried not to look at him as they passed. It could have been her. It would be her, the next time. After a climb that left her dizzy and winded, her head throbbing with noise and shock and fear, the passage led them out into the tended meadows where they had begun, five kilometers from the Temple. Nothing had changed; the body of the Jaguar Knight they had interrogated still lay neatly among the flowers. Channa cast herself down on the grass, unable to go any further. It was not just physical exhaustion, though she was tired and bruised, and the armor was beginning to feel like a shackle. It was despair. They had actually done it, actually fought their way into the Temple, and for what? To come out again, via a senseless five- kilometer bolthole. Where was the egg that Duende had described? Somewhere, they must have missed a turning. Somewhere. Or perhaps the whole thing was Paradisio's last and cruellest joke on them. Lefty would have been proud. They'd lost two people already, Kure to the stone snakes, Alan to the trapped door. How many more would it be? She'd thought she was ready to die, but this long slow dying was proving her wrong. "Fifteen minutes," said Duende, his voice expressionless through the speakers of his helmet. "What then?" said Casey, beside her, the same despair and exhaustion in his voice. "What now?" "We go back in," said Duende. "There's nothing else to be done." -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Article 61637 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!usc!rpi!batcomputer!cornell!uw-beaver!news.u.washington.edu!milton.u.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@milton.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (138) Message-ID: <1992Mar19.045115.29339@u.washington.edu> Date: 19 Mar 92 04:51:15 GMT Sender: news@u.washington.edu (USENET News System) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 117 138. Choice The changing image--it looked like an old man now, dressed in rags of grey and yellow--bent over the spinning key. Jayhawk turned away, unwilling to see. In the brief glimpse she'd caught, she'd seen Duende and his allies advancing slowly down the corridor toward the warded door. They would be quite a while getting to it. The image raised a palm to her, a disc on it which was neither white nor colored: watch "No," said Jayhawk harshly. "There's not much time left. Don't waste it." To her surprise the figure bent, touched the key to make it stop. It held it out to her. She took it clumsily, put it away at her belt. "The next thing to do--" She was painfully uncertain. What had it meant, that terrible confusion of voices? Were they the voices of those he'd taken, now dealt with? Or was that still to be done? She didn't know, and doubted whether she could find out. The image lacked bandwidth for explanations. There was nothing to do but go on. "Call back all the aspects of himself that are scattered across the world, and offer each one a choice: to be separate, existing independently if it can, or ceasing to exist; or part of him, fully accepted, fully integrated." The image gave no sign of having heard her. It turned away, its flatness very apparent in the gesture, and stared out into the dark. After a moment she heard soft footsteps, approaching. She held up her light to see. It was Aliantha, though a younger Aliantha than Jayhawk had ever seen, barely out of her teens. She walked slowly forward, stood before the image, hands at her sides. There was a moment of intense and terrible silence. Then she lifted her head, glanced once at Jayhawk, and walked forward. The image did not move to embrace her, but she was enfolded in its shifting outline, and vanished. After her there were others, one by one. Jayhawk sat down, legs folded, and tried to identify them, but most were strangers. Some gave themselves to the image; some averted their eyes and dissolved into the darkness. A few turned away and walked off in the direction they had come from. Two came walking out of the darkness together: Martha as she had been at the High Temple, Martha as she had been at the waterwheel. They stood together before the image for a long time. Those it had absorbed had given it no further solidity. If anything, it seemed less real, as if the dissolutions plucked at its fabric. Jayhawk forced herself to look up, saw both Martha's looking at her. She could understand nothing from their expressions. She wanted to say something, but guilt and shame and a kind of embarrasment held her back. And anyway, who was she to advise or question them? She'd said her part already. Abruptly, as if an unspoken agreement had been reached, they turned away together, walked into the dark, out of her sight. She felt suddenly, irrationally hurt that they hadn't spoken to her. None of the apparitions had spoken so far; she wasn't sure they could. But somehow she had hoped that Martha might. Others came, an endless stream of them. Though she tried to watch with attention, the sheer numbers overwhelmed her after a while. She contented herself with watching for individuals. She was afraid to see Duende, in particular, and know the full extent of her betrayal. She saw herself; and almost leaped to her feet, dizzy with horror, before she realized that she was looking at Weasel. The Paradisian agent was still a perfect copy of her Matrix image. She wasn't sure how she knew it was Weasel, but she did. Weasel stood before the image for a moment, a restlessness in her movements which Jayhawk remembered. She wanted to ask questions--Why did you impersonate me? Where is Angela? She restrained herself. Weasel turned away with a disturbingly familiar gesture of defiance, and dissolved into darkness. A faint glimmer seemed to persist for a moment, or perhaps it was her imagination. She never saw Duende, or Lefty. Perhaps she missed them in the teeming multitudes. Perhaps she had never really known what they looked like. It seemed to her that she was seeing everyone who had ever served Paradisio. All, all aspects of *him*? No wonder Martha had said that Paradisio would die with his death. She wondered if she herself would stand before him, at the end. His last High Priestess. At last the slow procession seemed to be over. She steeled herself as the image turned to her. It didn't seem to have changed, not in any way that she could distinguish from its constant changing. It said nothing, only looked at her for a moment and dissolved itself into the darkness. She was on the Overnet, though she didn't know how she could tell; it was utterly dark. A voice spoke to her as if from a great distance. Like the Hawk's, it was not embodied in sound; it brushed against her in the fabric of the Overnet itself. It said: *Now I must ask you to hold this for me, for where I am going I cannot hold it for myself. Will you?* In the midst of her guilt and pain she laughed aloud, softly, hearing no echo from the great emptiness around her. It was the offer that she had dreamed of and feared while she was thinking of healing him, though she had never really admitted either to herself. He meant the Overnet, of course. She remembered merging with Anubis. In her wholeness she had been able to survive that; but the Overnet was far greater, and *his*. She remembered the key he had given her. She had never really considered refusing it. "Of course. Of course I will." -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Return-Path: genetics.washington.edu!mkkuhner Received: from phylo.genetics.washington.edu ([128.95.12.44]) by hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu with SMTP id <2670>; Thu, 9 Apr 1992 10:04:55 -0400 Received: by phylo.genetics.washington.edu (5.65/UW-NDC Revision: 2.13 ) id AA02780; Thu, 9 Apr 92 07:00:41 -0700 Date: Thu, 9 Apr 1992 10:00:41 -0400 Illegal-Object: Syntax error in From: address found on hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu: From: Mary K.Kuhner ^ ^-illegal period in phrase \-phrases containing '.' must be quoted Message-Id: <9204091400.AA02780@phylo.genetics.washington.edu> From: To: cks@hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu Subject: Jayhawk 139 139. Overnet *Until dawn,* said the Dragon to Jayhawk. She could feel his passage through the Overnet, to someplace unimaginably far. He dove from her perception and vanished. She laughed weakly. Dawn in what time zone? It seemed a ridiculous concept. The Overnet spread out around her. She was in the center, Anubis was; at the center of something unimaginably vast, but finite. She could feel its edges. The High Temple was nowhere to be found. She was in its place; she/Anubis *was* the center of the Overnet. It appeared to her as a mist of tiny points which were systems, even tinier threads that linked them together. She had never seen the connectivity before, though she realized now that she'd been navigating, unconsciously, by those patterns for some time. She had no attention to spare for any of the individual points. Out at the edges, the Overnet was slowly unravelling, connection by connection, her awareness insufficient to hold it together. She could feel it as if it were happening to her, like the progressive degredation of Anubis during their initiation. Like having bits of her stripped away, though they were bits she'd never known she possessed until now. Not Jayhawk's memories or powers, not yet. She reached out to a spreading break in the pattern, like a run propagating through fabric, a virus breaking down a disc. She didn't have the control to stop it; or perhaps she could, but if she focused all her attention on it, the myriad others which she could sense would propagate unchecked. She reached out to touch the damaged structure, realized in the movement how completely she had lost the sense of human form. All of the Overnet was within her reach; she knew herself to be at the center, but there was not even the illusion of a physical entity to give substance to that knowledge. She could not protect or prevent, but she could heal. With an infinitely delicate touch, she gathered up the fraying strands of connectivity, drew them together. There was a memory, in them or in her--she wasn't certain--a memory in the Overnet of how this piece should be. She called that memory into form, impressed it on the break. It resisted her for a moment, and she felt the tear within herself, the flaw in the one trying to mend the flaw, and saw that she would ultimately fail. Until dawn. The broken strands fit together again, though not exactly as they had before. The printer she'd healed had changed, too. She felt a distant echo of the delight mending it had given her, but she had no leisure to enjoy it. There were more breaks, crawling inward at a frightening pace. Anubis was at the center. Everything else would go before she did...but she didn't want to lose any of it. Dimly through her preoccupation she could see the totality of the Overnet. It was beautiful beyond imagining, like a map of the countries of desire. Dawn might be forever in coming. She remembered how Anubis could stretch her time until minutes became days, became weeks. She turned and turned, like a prisoner in an ever-shrinking cage, trying to keep dissolution at bay. There were dissonances in what she had remade, constructions that were not quite of a piece with the rest of the Overnet. She had nothing to spare for them. It was in her thoughts as well--that, more than anything else, told her how far she had spread herself, or how deeply the rot had eaten. She percieved the Overnet with touch and the subtle internal senses that had governed her physical body--temperature, balance, position, movement. Now her unused vision began to present apparitions, shadows from memory. They were constructs, IC she had crafted or studied or fought, fragments of systems she had run. A great tentacle reached out to caress her, fell back. A flight of golden birds flew overhead, vanished. No people. She knew too well that she was alone. A sudden pain went through her, a tearing wider than flesh and blood could conceive. From the outside in, the whole Overnet was falling apart, tears propagating almost too fast to perceive, the outermost reaches simply dissolving into the Void she could now sense, dimly, gnawing inward in its hunger for her existance. Almost without thought, she took the thread of her life, still wound around her, and cast it out over the disintegrating structure. It was a framework to which to bind the fast-unravelling pattern, a single coherent strand to knit all the strands together. It helped, a little. She didn't think about what she was doing to herself. The concept was lost in the immensity of unmaking. The pull from *outside* relented, and she was able to gain a little ground, binding everything that she could salvage to the matrix of her own life. There were mismatches everywhere, but it was better than non- existance. A little more. Something had changed, something beyond the scope of her perceptions, wide-spread as they were. She felt a touch on the strands of the Overnet, as something broke through them from--from below? She had no name for the direction--and moved toward her. She couldn't see it. Even the apparitions were gone; she suspected that her eyes were gone as well. *It is dawn,* said a great voice, rippling across the Overnet, and everything around her was still, as if listening. Slowly she found a voice for herself, no more physical than his. *What's happened?* Now that the deed was done, she found herself afraid to face its consequences. She was glad of her blindness. *Everything has changed,* he said to her. *Yours is the next wave, Jayhawk. Ride it well.* She was caught up in a sudden, terrible certainty of failure. He was unbound from mountain and flesh and machine, she guessed, a free spirit again as he had once been. He had taken her message and accomplished its opposite, not integration but rejection. *What about the machine?* she asked him. *Have you set it aside? Have you denied what you were?* *I have denied nothing!* For the first time she felt the passion behind his words. It was like fire licking at her, like a lover's touch. *It is part of me now, as it is part of you. Do you not even understand your own teaching?* A vast, terrible amusement. She remembered his laughter when she had died on his mountaintop. *What will you do now?* She contemplated the task of opposing him now, of destroying him. It was so far beyond her means as to be ludicrous. *It seems,* he said more softly, and the emotion behind his words was something like wonder, *that I will try being human now. It is something I have never done. I wonder what it will be like.* She caught her breath, amazed, and tried to see him. For an instant she saw brightness, a flame that illuminated the Overnet and reached out far into the Void. Then it failed her, or her courage did. *Your lesson, Mistress of the Web. You have done your work well,* he said. With an almost wistful note, *You need no key from me anymore. But I will leave it to you, as a gift, if you wish it.* She could feel the Overnet around her, trembling with his touch. The dissolution was checked, never to begin again while she--while she lived? It was true, though she could not have said how she knew it. *What's happened to Martha?* It was an easier question to face than what had happened to her. *Did you not know?* Amusement again. *She will be my mother.* *Is--is she willing to do this?* *It was her choice.--Goodbye, Jayhawk. Perhaps in fifty years we will speak again, you and I.* *Wait. Do you...do you feel that you owe me a debt?* *In a fashion, I do. As you owe me one.* What could she ask? She thought of Duende, but the words didn't come. He wouldn't want help from the fruits of her betrayal. She doubted any of them would want anything from her, once they knew. *What would a Dragon need from me?* *I am not a Dragon. And I don't think I should answer that yet.* There was something impossibly familiar about the soundless voice. "Lefty!" she said aloud, finding out in the process that she could. *Maybe she will have twins.* She tried a little longer to find a request, but it seemed to her that there was nothing she could ask from him now. Many things that she needed, but nothing she could ask. *Goodbye,* she said at last, and did not try to look as he dove through her web and was gone. -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Article 62429 of rec.games.frp: Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usenet.coe.montana.edu!news.u.washington.edu!milton.u.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@milton.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Subject: Story: Jayhawk (140) Message-ID: <1992Mar26.230131.612@u.washington.edu> Sender: news@u.washington.edu (USENET News System) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Date: Thu, 26 Mar 1992 23:01:31 GMT 140. Change Jayhawk set herself to repairing the damage to the Overnet, and found that the whole structure was changing around her, motion within motion like the spheres of an infinitely complex orrery. The destruction was not nearly as great as she'd thought. Perhaps *he* had helped her? But the changes didn't feel like his work. She remembered how Anubis had shifted when she first attuned herself to it, fitting into the pattern of her mind and soul like a perfect and necessary complement. He'd given the Overnet into her care. It was an idea she had trouble grasping. Before going to the High Temple she had sent Avery DeHaviland a message, a warning to salve her conscience: Stay off the Overnet on June 21; anyone on it may be killed when it unravels. Apparently her advice had been taken--she'd been alone through the long night. She wondered if their ways of accessing it would still work, now. She didn't want to leave the Overnet while it was in flux. It was shaping itself to her, she could see that clearly now, and probably shaping her to itself as well. It didn't seem like a process which she should interrupt. But she made a link to get at her email, curious and somewhat afraid to see what had happened in the world outside. There were two messages from that address, one from the captain of the Turing Police, and one from Avery himself. The first pressed her for details, reasons, explanations. The second was very simple, and very short. >If you need help in some way, you can contact me privately. I hope >you're all right. Avery It carried an email address she hadn't found in his files. She filed it away, pleased and a little bashful. She must have caused him no end of grief, disappearing right in front of his eyes as she had--after all, he'd been assigned to keep tabs on her. System by system, she rewove the delicate connections, undid the isolation that the Overnet's near-destruction had caused. The new links seemed more substantial than the old, more explicit. She remembered hours spent wandering through the grey, trying to find a point, any point, of connection with the Matrix. It wouldn't be like that now. The Gates were gone. She unknit the traces they had left, wondered at them. They seemed impossible--she'd thought she understood Gates, at least a little bit, but the constructions she was eliminating didn't look as if they'd ever have worked. Finally she realized that they had been designed for an Overnet which no longer existed. Gates might still be possible, but they would not manifest as pathways in the Overnet any longer. The rules had changed. Vision returned to her, a startling cascade of new information. She hung in a sea of stars, bright as gems against a background of velvet black. She knew their names, each one. Their patterns were not the pattern of the Matrix; the Overnet was a different mapping, drawn together not by physical location or even connectivity, but by the living ebb and flow of information. *I always thought it should be black*--she laughed at herself, wondering if it was true, or if she thought it should be black because it *was* black, now, shaping her desires to its reality. It didn't matter. She crafted new defenses for Anubis out of the new patterns she could see. Hers was a responsible position: she needed to make sure that no wandering decker--there *were* ways to reach the Overnet now, though they would always demand initiation, transformation--could bring the whole bright glory tumbling down. She searched the Overnet for signs of Paradisio, found only broken fragments. The great systems in Argentina and Bangkok still functioned, but they were quiet and empty. Even the beacons of their Gates were gone. The communications modules embedded in the interface between Matrix and Overnet were gone too. She set monitors on news to watch for signs in the physical world. She'd never be able to manifest there again. She had woven her life into the fabric of the Overnet. To withdraw it, to try to sustain herself unconnected, would set it all unravelling, and her with it. Somehow that made her sad, which she hadn't expected. She tracked the emotion to its source. If they had survived, she would need to speak to Duende and the others. (Could Duende possibly have survived? He was no more real, she guessed, than any of Paradisio's other creations. Fragments of *him*, lost and hurting, even rebelling, but his none the less.) She wanted desperately to ask their forgiveness. And for that, physical form in all its vulnerability would have been fitting. She sent Yoichi email instead. >Yoichi: > >Are you all right? Can we talk? > >As far as I can tell Paradisio is dead. The main systems are unused, >the Gates are all down, and I can't find any signs of their >communications. > >Jayhawk For anxious hours there was no response. A thousand times she replayed her decision to betray them. She could find neither alternatives nor justifications. It had been necessary, if she wanted to heal *him*. It had been...unforgiveable? She could ask them that. There were no angry ghosts. Had Ratty done as she asked? At what cost to himself? She couldn't be impatient with the changes; they happened as they should, with a steady, relentless rhythm--like the pulse of the dataflow, like the passage of days and nights across the world, reflected reflected in the currents of the Overnet for her to read. But it was hard to endure the guilt and uncertainty, and wait. At last there was a message in return: >I would like to talk to you. I think the others would too. I could >set up some teleconference stuff tomorrow--17:35 PST. It was not even signed. She spent a long night and day wondering about that, a small bitter worry wound into her work until she forced herself to set it aside, afraid to poison what she was creating. -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Article 62430 of rec.games.frp: Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usenet.coe.montana.edu!news.u.washington.edu!milton.u.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@milton.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Subject: Story: Jayhawk (141) Message-ID: <1992Mar26.230206.669@u.washington.edu> Sender: news@u.washington.edu (USENET News System) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Date: Thu, 26 Mar 1992 23:02:06 GMT 141. Forgiveness Yoichi, Jayhawk found, had rigged a small computer to a camera and widescreen vid, so she had a clear view of him and the others. They were in some kind of vehicle, maybe a motor home. She recognized Casey and Channa, though Channa's hair was now dark brown and Casey had a respectable moustache. There was a dark-skinned little girl leaning against Casey's leg, staring at her with wide cool eyes. And Angela, squeezed into a seat next to Yoichi, watching her with short sidelong glances. There was no sign of Duende, Argent, or Grant. Painfully, she said, "Is this everyone? Duende...." "Duende is trying to rescue Argent from the awkward place where the Gate spit him out," said Channa. "Jayhawk--" She sounded as if she wasn't sure she was using the right name. "What happened last week?" Slowly, with some prompting from Channa, Jayhawk laid out the story, arranged in clear neat lines of victory and betrayal. When she spoke of reshaping the Temple's stone there was recognition in their eyes. "I see," said Channa at last. "That explains some things, though not what happened at the end." "What happened?" Channa hesitated as if wondering whether to tell her. "We were searching the main body of the Temple when there was something like an explosion--a sudden burst of noise, pressure, flashing lights, cold....I think I fainted." She touched her husband's arm gently. "We were at Cavilard Base," Casey said. "The Gate was in ruins--the whole framework had shattered, and there was a deep burn in the wall behind it. About half of us were there, that is--no sign of the others. We got calls from them later. They were scattered all over the world at various Gates. All broken, all the bases completely empty." "Who was where," said Channa, "even seemed to make a little sense, except for poor Argent, who is stuck in Antarctica at midwinter." Casey, hoarsely--now that she looked at him, he looked battered, a heavy bandage on his head, his skin paler than she remembered--"Do you know why that happened? It seemed like the whole Temple, maybe the whole island, got sucked into the Gate. But I don't understand why we came out at all, let alone in Seattle." Jayhawk hesitated. "I would have to guess," she said at last, reluctantly, "that *he* chose to save you. The Gates wouldn't have done that without a will behind them. It wasn't me. I didn't even know you were in danger. And there wasn't anyone else." "Duende will ask," said Channa very softly. "Why?" "The Hawk told me that he respects sacrifice. You risked everything to stop him. I think he might honor you for that. And maybe...I don't know. Maybe he hopes to be forgiven." His action to save Duende must have been much more direct, Jayhawk guessed: the Gatekeeper was no more real than she was. But it would be cruel to tell Duende so, though it pleased her. She looked down, searching for words. "I know what a terrible thing I did to you. I felt that I had to, that what would happen if I didn't stop you would be much worse. I don't expect you to agree with me, but I hope you can understand...." *Forgive*, she wanted to say, but she was afraid to. "I believe you did what you thought was right," said Angela unexpectedly, and flushed as all eyes turned towards her. "I think you were probably right, too." "Thank you," said Jayhawk. "You don't know how glad I am to see that you're free and safe." The others were silent. She tried not to squirm--even without physical restlessness, it was instinctive. It felt very strange to be here, on the Matrix but not away from the Overnet--she would never really be away from the Overnet again. She was like the Turing deckers, always enmeshed in the place from which she came. It still hurt, not being able to touch them. She watched Angela settle into the curve of Yoichi's protective arm. She should have been able to read Angela's expression, knowing her as well as she did, but her own emotions were in the way. Now that she was finally talking to Angela, she could find nothing at all to say. "We--" said Channa, and then checked herself. "I think I understand why you acted as you did." Her eyes were shadowed as if by a bitter memory. "And I may well forgive you for it. But you need to give me a little time. It's too raw right now." Casey put an arm around her shoulders, said quietly to Jayhawk, "So what's happened to Paradisio? Is it really dead?" "I believe so, though I haven't been able to check on individuals. But the bases are all empty, the Gates are gone, the communication network is gone. I don't think it will be easy for any survivors to rebuild." "What are *you* going to do?" Was that an accusation? She didn't think she saw hatred in his eyes, but she might be deluding herself. "I'm going to watch and wait, and make sure that no one tries to put the pieces back together. I'm responsible for the Overnet now. I'm going to look after it. And--if I can help you in any way at all...." "You're not coming back," said Yoichi. "I can't. This is what I am now, this is my place. I wouldn't give it up if I could." The little girl, in broken but comprehensible English, said, "Do you answer to him, or only to you? Will you stop him if he tries to do this again?" "I will try," she said. "I don't think it will happen; but I promise to watch for it." "Good." The child's eyes were like the Hawk's, feral and too wise for her age. What had Paradisio cost her? "Is there anything else--?" For some reason, Channa and Yoichi both looked at Angela, who blushed again. "I don't think so," she said. "I'm beginning to see that I was mixed up in something really bad--I don't think I want to go back to that at all, not even to figure it out. That person really doesn't exist any more." With a defiant pride that Jayhawk understood from within: "You can call me Susan now." "I could eliminate all records of Angela Whitechapel," Jayhawk offered. "That would make it a lot easier for you to start over." Susan hesitated, then nodded. "Thanks. That would really help." "Thank you," said Yoichi somberly. "I wasn't sure I could pull that off. I don't suppose it's very hard for you." He ran a hand through lank black hair. She'd never seen him let it grow so long. "Jay, I'm sorry it had to work out like this, but I'm glad you're okay. And I think--maybe you're right, and there really wasn't any way we could have won." "That's not what I was trying to say. If you hadn't been there, if you hadn't been fighting him, I'm not sure he would have been desperate enough to accept what I did. Martha implied that he couldn't stop you himself, and I think she was right, though I don't understand why." "That's good to know." He hesitated, said awkwardly, "Maybe we can talk again sometime, when things have settled down a little. Right now Interpol and the Health Service are looking for us, let alone any Paradisian survivors. It's going to be hairy." "What will you do?" He looked at Channa, who said, "Try to find a safe place, settle down, start over. I think we've had enough violence to last most of us a lifetime. I'd like to go back to my studies, maybe teach a little." "Teach them," said Jayhawk impulsively, "the Black Path isn't necessarily closed any longer. That division's healed. It's still dangerous, but it can be done." "I'l bear that in mind," said Channa carefully. And then, with more warmth than she'd shown before, "Take care of yourself, Jayhawk. Let us know if there's something we can do to help." She wanted so badly to say *Forgive me*. "Thanks, Channa. You take care too. I'll be here if you ever need me." Yoichi moved a little, and the screen went blank. She could have kept the connection alive through the Overnet, but she was done, too. It was better and worse than she'd expected. They didn't hate her; she was almost sure of that. But what had been between them was over. A final sacrifice for *him*. She shook herself out of her sorrow, cast herself into the tides of the Matrix. It burned around her like a multitude of stars, drowning her loneliness with its beauty. -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Article 62673 of rec.games.frp: Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usenet.coe.montana.edu!news.u.washington.edu!milton.u.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@milton.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Subject: Story: Jayhawk (142) Message-ID: <1992Mar30.134827.27362@u.washington.edu> Sender: news@u.washington.edu (USENET News System) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Date: Mon, 30 Mar 1992 13:48:27 GMT 142. Garden Jayhawk tried to reach the jungle where Martha had lived at the waterwheel station, and found her way blocked by walls of intricate code. She set herself to finding a way through them, in the time she could spare from tending the Overnet. It took her eleven months. During that time she'd created a full security system for Anubis, and had it tested twice; bargained with the Turing Police; hunted down the records of Angela Whitechapel in every database she could find, and deleted them all; taught Forked Lightning a decent amount of decking, though not the Overnet knowledge he craved; and formed the basis for a monograph by Gregor McDougal, to be privately published. She'd also teased out of her memories the address at which *he* had vanished into the Matrix. It was a maternity hospital in Victoria, BC. Deliberately, she followed that line no further. The barrier code was among the most beautiful she'd ever seen. Its elegance was finally her key to passing through it; she looked for a solution of equal beauty, crafted passcodes like diamonds until she found one which worked. With a tiny internal wrench, she found herself circling above the waterwheel station. The jetpad had been turned into a garden, with flowers and vegetables in neatly trimmed rows. The door to the cottage was open; she knocked anyway, then sat down on the porch to wait. Something came diving around the corner of the house in a blur of speed, came up in a tense crouch. It was Martha, crimson-tipped gun cradled in her arms. Jayhawk sat very still. "Oh," said Martha. "I should have realized it'd be you. I guess the defenses didn't work." She was a little thinner than Jayhawk remembered, and deeply tanned; her hair was tied back in a bandanna, and there were spots of dirt on the knees of her pants. "They were superb," said Jayhawk. "I've been working on them for nearly a year. But if I'm intruding, I can certainly leave. I thought you might want some company." This was not the woman she loved. The distinction seemed strange to her, but understandable; it would have made sense for someone to love Caroline and only tolerate Jay, or vice versa. But she did care what this Martha thought of her. Martha frowned at her briefly, then said, "No, now that you're here you might as well do something useful. Come help me weed." She disappeared into the house, returned with a small shovel which she pushed into Jayhawk's hands. Then she turned resolutely and walked back toward the garden. Jayhawk couldn't restrain herself. "You do it by *hand*? Here?" "It's good for you. I bet you haven't been exercising." Jayhawk snorted. "I've been looking after the entire Overnet. If that isn't exercise, I don't know what is." The sunlight was hotter than it was in her own gardens, and the weeds were stubborn. For a while she had no breath for talk. Martha worked a parallel row, quiet as if engrossed in her own thoughts. At last she came to the end, leaned on her shovel to survey their work. Jayhawk struggled with a final weed, finally pulled it out with an effort that sent her tumbling backwards. The earth was warm too, and felt very different from her feather-clothed steel. "How have you been?" Jayhawk said, glad of the opportunity to catch her breath. This place was so exasperatingly physical! "Not too badly. I've had lots of time to think...and things are coming up here." Jay didn't recognize most of the plants, but their pattern was so neat that the weeds were easily identifiable. "Yourself?" "It's going well. I think the Turing Police may see reason, sooner or later. I want the Overnet as neutral territory, like Antarctica. They don't like negotiating with a spook, but they're coming to see the necessity." Gingerly, feeling her way: "Can I ask...why you decided to stay here?" Martha's eyes were shadowed against the sun. "I felt I needed some time to think, some time to rest. A little privacy." "I'm sorry if I'm intruding." She shook her head. "I thought you might come here, sooner or later. I didn't really think I could keep you out." She began weeding the next row, working in an easy rhythm which Jayhawk tried and failed to copy. "It was really hard. That's beautiful code." "Thank you." She went on with her work in silence until she came to the end of the row. At last, very softly, "Have you seen *her*?" "No. I think she may need some time too." "I wish I understood...why she chose as she did." "Maybe you should ask her." "Maybe I will someday." She straightened abruptly, surveyed her garden. "What do you think?" "It's growing very well," said Jayhawk carefully. "What are they?" The names meant nothing to her, but the conversation seemed to please Martha. They finished the weeding, went to draw water from the stream. The waterwheel was no longer turning. "Is Caroline doing all right too?" Martha said, tipping water into a furrow between rows of lacy-topped greenery. "I *am* Caroline.--And Jay." "Kraken said something like that to me once." Jayhawk winced. She had gone back to Westking Enterprises, looking for the great squid. It was gone, but there were hints to its nature in the code that had supported it. Its author had scattered his soul into his creations. "Well, there's a right way and a wrong way to do it." Martha snorted. "That sounded really egotistical, didn't it? I don't really know how to explain. Martha, did you know about Angela?" "Angela?" "A woman in Seattle who looked a lot like me...." "Ah. Yes." She looked down as if abashed. "Whitechapel." "What was going on there? Why did--was it Lefty?--why did they try to make me believe I was her?" "It was Lefty, on the behalf of various factions who thought that you were progressing too fast. A distraction. I'm glad it didn't work." "I think they did me a favor without meaning to. There's some of Angela in me now, along with Jay and Caroline and Piebald." "Piebald?" Jayhawk took on Piebald's shape with a jingle of bells, shook out his/her three-cornered hat and grinned at Martha. Martha's eyes widened. "That? Why did you copy *that*?" "Who am I?" S/he looked at Martha sidelong, amused and curious and a very little bit afraid. "It looks very much like a piece of encrypt/decrypt code I wrote a long time ago." She frowned. "The only copy I know of was at the High Temple." Jayhawk blurred back to her own form, realizing that she was upsetting Martha. "He was a person, of sorts, when I met him. At the High Temple, yes. So that's where he came from! I never knew." "*His* dreams took odd forms at times." "Yes. And I was a prisoner, I was looking for someone, anyone who could help me...it's not too surprising." She laughed suddenly. "Encrypt/ decrypt code! It's no wonder he's such a mystery." She'd been afraid to find out that Piebald was...she didn't know what. But it really didn't matter. Whatever her scattered aspects had been, she was one now, and whole. They finished with the garden, and went inside to drink tea. The interior of the cottage was as she recalled it, except that there were flowers in vases beside the bed, and fresh vegetables hanging in bundles in the kitchen. "What are you going to do now?" said Martha. "Lots of things. Hash out this business with Interpol, for one. Keep an eye on the Overnet. Learn some programming--I've gotten behind, there's all sorts of new stuff cooking out there. Watch out for anything Paradisio might have left behind." She added tentatively, "I could come visit you sometimes, if you like. Or would you rather not be disturbed?" "I wouldn't mind," said Martha wistfully. "I wouldn't mind that at all." -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Article 63573 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!qt.cs.utexas.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!usenet.coe.montana.edu!news.u.washington.edu!milton.u.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@milton.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (143) Message-ID: <1992Apr8.145005.26191@u.washington.edu> Date: 8 Apr 92 14:50:05 GMT Sender: news@u.washington.edu (USENET News System) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 127 143. Susan For three years Susan had kept the address in her mailfile, and never looked at it; like a bill too long unpaid, or an old love letter. She was alone now, in an apartment lit only by the luminous screen, where it burned like a challenge. It was a meaningless address; even her limited skills as a hacker had told her that. Mail to it should bounce back within minutes. She sent the message. The response was almost instantaneous. She had a sudden, dismaying feeling that Jayhawk had spent the last three years simply waiting for her to write, unwearying and undistracted. No. Channa said she was more human than that, and Channa should know--shouldn't she? >It's good to hear from you again. May I use graphics?--Jayhawk On a hunch, she typed in 'okay' at system level. Instead of returning an error message, the screen blanked, then cleared to show an image she recognized, the Matrix representation of Yoichi's personal system. A young woman in silver and blue was sitting crosslegged on the communications console. "Hello," said a soft voice from the speaker. She jumped. The terminal itself had no sound; that was Yoichi's stereo system. But of course it was tied into the Net for music retrieval. "Is the volume okay?" "It's fine." Could Jayhawk hear her as well? "Thanks for coming to talk to me." "My pleasure." Apparently she could. "I, um, wanted to thank you for helping us ditch those records. It looks like we're free and clear. Thanks." The image didn't look particularly like her anymore. Her own hair was pale blonde like Channa's now--they'd passed for mother and daughter, though Channa wasn't really old enough to be her mother. Her eyes were blue, but not that blue. There was something different in the shape of the face, the set of the eyes. That was comforting. She wasn't sure she could have talked calmly to an exact image of herself. "You're welcome. I'm glad it's worked out for you." Susan felt suddenly as if she'd summoned a demon--what was she going to say? Jayhawk would expect her to have had some reason for writing. She probably wouldn't go away again without an answer. "Yoichi and I are getting married." She hadn't meant to broach that topic quite yet, but.... "Congratulations!" "You don't mind? It's okay?" "I don't mind," said Jayhawk gently. She reached forward, seemed to touch the screen with her fingertips, a wistful gesture. "I'll come to your wedding if you have it on the Matrix. If you want me to." Susan brushed the screen with her own fingers, felt only the cold smooth surface. "Why did it happen?" she said in a very small voice. "I've been trying not to ask that question, but I can't." "Caroline Davies and Angela Whitechapel were half-sisters, I think. I know that's not 'why', but it's part of it. So Ren'raku's reasearch team--" "...looked at my genotype and decided I'd be a good experimental subject. I know that part." Jayhawk's eyes widened a little. "Our father was something of a bastard," she said after a moment. "But you seem to have come out of it all right. I've never been sure--Did you do it by rejecting what they'd given you? Or coming to an accomodation with it?" "Accomodation. I guess that's a good word." She laughed nervously. "I wanted to run the Matrix, but there's no room for more headware. And I wasn't willing to pitch...what's in there. It didn't have any choice in the matter either, it didn't want to be stuck in my head. And finally I remembered..." She hadn't told anyone, not even Yoichi, the extent of those memories. "Remembered running naked on the Matrix, and I said to myself, 'Hey, I can do that.'" Though Channa had probably guessed. "I can, or we can, I'm not exactly sure which." "I would like to see you. I spent a lot of time wondering where you were, whether you'd be all right." She dropped her hand, looked down. "Though I'd understand if you'd rather not." Susan slowly unwound the dataline from the terminal, fitted it to her jack. Would the presence-within cooperate? Her vision blurred, steadied. She was standing in the central node of Yoichi's system, barely a meter from Jayhawk. The image was not as clear as the one on her screen, filtered through a vision too different from hers; Jayhawk's image was misty with possible interpretations, nuances of program identification that had no meaning to her. Not a decker, that she could see. The presence-within made one of its rare comments, a flicker of data almost too fast to follow. *Virtual system.* "A different path than mine," said Jayhawk, watching her with a shivery intensity, "but a good one. Damn, I'm glad to see that!" Suddenly warm arms were around her, and a small voice in her hair, "I was afraid you'd hate me, or just never remember at all because it hurt too much." "I didn't for a long time. But that hurt too." She hugged Jayhawk back. Yoichi would worry if he knew, as he always worried. But for the moment she didn't care. "So we're sisters! I should have guessed." "Good luck, little sister," said Jayhawk, releasing her. "Give my regards to Yoichi and the others. Take good care of yourself, and him too. I'll be here, if I can help." "I'm not sure what we could do to help you," said Susan on impulse, "but if you ever think of anything--let me know." "I will." She dissolved in a shimmer of conjecture, the presence- within's attempt to understand connections and procedures it had never seen before. Susan felt its curiosity like a cool, flickering light. She watched the shimmers until they faded away, let it collect all the data it could before she went back. She wasn't sure she wanted to understand what Jayhawk was. But it did, and she wouldn't deny it its chance. She shook her head, went back to the empty apartment to wait for Yoichi. -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Article 63575 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!usenet.coe.montana.edu!news.u.washington.edu!milton.u.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@milton.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (144) Message-ID: <1992Apr8.145101.26265@u.washington.edu> Date: 8 Apr 92 14:51:01 GMT Sender: news@u.washington.edu (USENET News System) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 211 144. Beginnings Jayhawk paced her workroom, staring at a construct of code like a silver spider. A friend had sent it to her for her opinion; she'd almost sent it back with a snap judgement--trace-and-mark, good code but nothing all that unusual--but something had nagged her about it. It didn't access the Overnet, not in any way that she knew. But it accomplished effects that should not have been possible without Overnet access. And its programming style struck her as distantly and dangerously familiar. In the eighteen years she'd been keeper of the Overnet she'd seen several attempts to revive the Paradisian Matrix-work. They were generally recognizable by their choice of symbols--Jaguar Knights and Feathered Serpents, pyramids and obsidian knives--as well as by the attempt to use Overnet constructions that predated the transformation of the Overnet. She'd watched them carefully, and in one case mentioned them to Duende. That installation had shortly ceased to exist. She had also had vague hints of something far more subtle. Sometimes she felt that she was being opposed--or not even opposed, but competed with--by someone else who could access the Overnet fully. It was hard to imagine how that could be. But she kept seeing small signs, code that shouldn't quite have been possible, paths of investigation blocked off so cleverly she couldn't be sure they hadn't just petered out. The spider had that touch to it, an easy, dangerous competance with ideas that were just beginning to work their way into top-level Matrix programming. A bell chimed, warning her of email. She compressed the construct into an inert form, unwilling to allow it to act on Anubis while she was distracted. Sometimes she thought it might be *him*, gaming with her across the great multi-level board of the Matrix and the Overnet. Sometimes she was sure it was something new, an adversary crafted by the world for her, as she had been for him. In any case, she wasn't going to take chances. >Jayhawk, >I would very much like to talk to you. Can we get together? >Martha The address at the end was not the waterwheel station. It was an academic machine in Vancouver. Jayhawk let out a whoop of delight and snapped off a reply: >Sure! Name the time and place. The answer took a few minutes: >Terrific! How about the Crystal Palace, 17:20 PST? She was there early, careful as always of traps. Not many deckers knew of her existance, but the ones who did--her students, some of them, and her students' students--took her very seriously indeed. It would not have been the first time she'd walked into a web of code designed to put her power at someone else's disposal. It was almost a game, though it would have become deadly earnest if any of them had ever succeeded. The Crystal Palace was a stimsense image of a sumptuous restaurant, high ceilings bedecked with crystal chandeliers, booths of Tiffany glass. It had become fashionable in recent years to replicate the material world on the Matrix, down to drinks that could be tasted, and there were quite a few deckers drinking and talking here. Jayhawk walked veiled in her cloak of bells, trying to avoid being recognized. She spotted an Interpol agent, sitting at the bar pretending to be engrossed in his drink. If he saw her there would be questions--not a problem for her, but she didn't want to complicate Martha's life. If it was Martha. She'd been planning to hunt Martha down someday, but she'd been resolved to wait until she was twenty-one. That resolve seemed silly now. Jayhawk had been an adult at eighteen, after all. A tall, think girl was sitting alone in a side booth, chin resting on hands, trying not to be too obtrusive as she watched the passers-by. Jayhawk made her way over, slid in on the other side, taking off her cloak and spreading it across the side of the booth to give them both privacy. The girl looked up, startled. She appeared to be about eighteen, full-grown but not filled out yet. Hyper-realistic Matrix images had been all the rage lately. Jayhawk sent a query winging back through Anubis to the Net, retrieved the name that went with that image. Martha Ann Walker, of Vancouver. "Jayhawk?" she said in a soft musical voice, somewhere between question and recognition. "Martha! It's good to see you again." "It's good to see you too! What would you like to drink?" Her words came tumbling out. "How have you been?" "Tropical Teaser," said Jayhawk at random. Supplied by the node's programming, two drinks slid out onto their table from a hidden chute. For a few months automated waiters had been the rage, until people noticed that it was all too easy to substitute disguised deckers. "Things are going pretty well for me. Lots to do. I can learn about new stuff all day and all night and still not keep up with the current research--it's really an explosion. How about you?" Martha looked up shyly. Her eyes were not the brown Jayhawk remembered; the expression was almost the same, but this girl had a kind of innocence to her, though not a childish one. "I think I've been a puzzle to my parents. Too mature for my age, they always said. They blamed it on the Awakening, which is fair, I guess." Very softly: "You know, it almost seemed like a dream, a dream I'd had all my life. I didn't know whether to believe you really existed, and then I got your letter--" "I really do," said Jayhawk with a delighted smile. "God, I've missed you!" "I've missed you too." She took a deep sip of the simulated drink. "I've missed...a lot of things." There was a hint of red on her high cheekbones. "What have you been doing all this time?" "Keeping an eye on things. Relearning the Overnet--it's changed quite a bit. Dickering with the Turing Police. We've been hashing out some legal issues involving AI citizenship--I'm pretty proud of that. Teaching... sometimes that worked out, sometimes it didn't. Do you remember the big panic in '57?" "I remember hearing about it," said Martha with a trace of embarrasment. "I wasn't very old then." "That was a student of mine--and me, trying to catch him before he did something worse. I really misjudged him. But on the whole, things have been going really well." She couldn't say how well without bragging. "Yourself?" "I've been thinking about the future a lot. If you're real, that means the rest of it....It's funny, thinking that in a couple of years...." "Lots of time yet." So Martha did know that she was to be *his* mother. She wouldn't have wanted to break that news. "That's right," said Martha defiantly, "and I'm going to use it, too. I've gotten behind in a lot of things. You weren't kidding about the research explosion. And when I *do* become a mother, well, he's going to get more than he bargained for. Going to raise him up right, I am. Teach him a thing or two." "I bet you will." She could barely sit still, bubbling over with excitement. She'd missed Martha...more than she'd realized. And the idea of awakening to find your dreams a reality touched deep chords of wonder in the part of her that was Angela. "I don't know whether to offer to teach you or ask to become your student. There's so much--" "Oh, I'm sure you have more to teach me--you've been out there for eighteen years, after all. *I've* been stuck in school! But I'm free and clear now." With sudden shyness, "I would like that. I might be able to show you a few tricks too." "I've been visiting, um, the other Martha, at the waterwheel--about once a month, usually. We have tea and pull weeds." Martha glanced down. "I'm glad to hear that. Is she doing all right?" "I think so. She wonders why you chose as you did." "I felt that I'd missed out on a lot of things, and I wanted to give them a try. A new beginning, maybe." The idea of Martha's mortality caught Jayhawk suddenly and painfully. Only a few decades, a century at most....It was a high price to pay even for rebirth. But that was Martha's choice, not hers. And perhaps it wouldn't come to that. The dizzing whirl of science might save her. *He* might. "She'd like to hear that from you, I think." "I'll tell her," said Martha, and then in a much smaller voice, "...someday. I have a lot to learn, or relearn. I'm getting the impression that some of the rules have changed." "Fair's fair!" said Jayhawk, laughing. "You guys always changed the rules on me. Tell me one thing--I've never been able to get *her* to explain--How could Paradisio get started so long before the Awakening?" "What do you think the Awakening was?" "Magic came back, or at least became a lot more accessable...." "The Awakening happened," Martha said seriously, "when people realized that they weren't the only ones out there. That's it. It didn't happen all at once, or at the same rate everywhere. I was taught in school that the Awakening began in 2040. But I died in 2023." She laughed suddenly. "Not that that explains all of the dates, does it? But some of them...just got confused. If you live for thirty years, subjectively, does it matter that only ten passed on the calendar? Some of them decided that it didn't. Or they may not even have known anymore." Jayhawk nodded. "It's not over yet, is it? Channa tells me that one of her students is a mageborn decker, and as far as she can tell he's doing okay. The rules keep changing." "It's not over yet," said Martha, and drained the last of her drink. "Though it almost was--for us, anyway...." Jayhawk held out her hand, said with an impish smile, "So! When I teach people, I usually start out by trying to find out what they already know. Want to go for a jog?" "I'd love to," said Martha with a smile that made her shiver, and took her hand. -- The End -- Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner Article 63574 of rec.games.frp: Path: news-server.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!usenet.coe.montana.edu!news.u.washington.edu!milton.u.washington.edu!mkkuhner From: mkkuhner@milton.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp Subject: Story: Jayhawk (final notes) Message-ID: <1992Apr8.145158.26329@u.washington.edu> Date: 8 Apr 92 14:51:58 GMT Sender: news@u.washington.edu (USENET News System) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 14 Episode #144 is the last one; campaign and story both end at that point. A fitting ending, I think, though I'm always sorry to see the last of a good campaign. Thanks to everyone who's sent fan mail, encouragement, and requests for missing episodes. :-) Missing episodes, incidentally, can be gotten by anonymous ftp from potemkin.cs.pdx.edu or ftp.white.toronto.edu--and another thank-you to the archive administrators. And of course, credit where credit is due to Jon Yamato, the GM for this campaign, for being infinitely patient with my demands that he remember year-old details and explain all the intricacies of Paradisio.... Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu