F Wilson - Fatal Error

"You mentioned 'code,' " Ferron said. "Are we talking virus here?"

Shit.

"Another kind of code," Hank said quickly. "One we need to break."

But Ferron was right. Jihad-its official designation would be Jihad4/20-was one hell of a virus. If all went according to plan, it would be spread across the globe by the end of the week.

"The Internet is not their real target," the Lady said.

Jack studied her. She looked better than she had last summer right after Rasalom and his boys in the Kickers and the Order damn near killed her. Against all odds, despite the Fhinntmanchca, the mythic killing force that had zeroed in on her, she'd survived. But just barely.

Jack first met her when he was a kid. She'd appeared then as an eccentric old woman with a three-legged dog. Over the ensuing years she'd stepped in and out of his life as females of varying ages, always with some sort of dog at her side.

The dog was gone now-it hadn't survived the assault-but she persevered. But only as an old Lady. Used to be she could change her looks, but she seemed to have lost that ability. Used to be she could shift her presence to anywhere on Earth, but no more. She never left this apartment.

"Sorry," Weezy said as she stepped into the room, late as usual.

She'd shed some weight since popping back into Jack's life last summer. Instead of the baggy sweat suits she'd worn then, she was now dressed in fitted jeans and a long-sleeved black sweater under a ski vest. She'd let her dark hair grow and had it tied back in a simple ponytail. Her pale face was makeup free, a far cry from the heavy gothesque eyeliner she'd worn as a teen. She carried the Compendium of Srem under her arm.

The group-Jack had started calling it the Ally's Gang of Four-was now complete. They'd been meeting a couple of times a month, sometimes more often, to discuss the goings-on in the world and which of those might be related to Rasalom or those doing his bidding. And also to learn what Weezy had gleaned from her ongoing study of the Compendium.

But that was all they did: Talk. And it was driving Jack nuts.

The meeting place was always the same: the Lady's apartment in the building on Central Park West owned by Glaeken, who had adopted the identity of Gaston Veilleur and insisted on being addressed as "Veilleur." As usual, he sat at one end of the heavy oblong table, the Lady at the other. Jack and Weezy occupied the flanks.

Jack shook his head. The Gang of Four… a former immortal, a woman who wasn't really a woman-or even human-and a pair of thirty-something humans… all that stood between humanity and the Otherness.

Pretty pathetic. A kind of cosmic joke. But the cosmic shadow war raging behind the scenes was anything but a joke. Two nameless, unimaginable forces vying for control of the sentient realities across the multiverse. Earth was one of those. Just one of many. Not the golden prize, simply another marble in the pouch. But only the sentient marbles were valuable; the non-sentient were brushed aside.

Earth was currently the possession of a force people had come to call the Ally-not really an ally, and in no way benign; more like indifferent. The Otherness, however, was unquestionably inimical, and had been vying for millennia to make Earth its own. Rasalom led its forces here. Veilleur, as Glaeken, used to lead the Ally's, but had been released and allowed to age. He was now as mortal as Jack and Weezy.

"Then what is their target?" Weezy said.

The Lady waited for her to take her seat opposite Jack before speaking.

"I am."

"Because the Internet feeds the noosphere?" Veilleur said in his rumbling voice. A broad-shouldered man with a scarred face, a gray beard, and a dominating presence-not unexpected, considering he'd been born thousands of years ago in the First Age.

The Lady nodded. "And the noosphere feeds me."

The noosphere again. Jack had first heard the term last summer; Weezy had bandied it around a lot back then, but not much since. He hadn't quite grasped it then, and most of what he'd learned had slipped away over the ensuing months. He'd had other things on his mind.

"Can you give me a refresher on that?"

Weezy said, "Where are you fuzzy?"

"Around the edges… and all through the middle."

She smiled. "Okay. Capsule version: Back in the nineteenth century a Jesuit named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin had a theory that the growth of human numbers and interactions would create a separate consciousness called the noosphere. Turned out he was right. It's real, and it's fed by every thought, every interaction between every sentient being on the planet. It's not cyberspace, though cyberspace adds to it. Every email, every Twitter tweet, every MySpace or Facebook add or app or comment, every chat-room quip, every blog entry or comment, every text message or eBay bid-billions upon billions of interactions every hour, all between sentient beings, and all adding to the noosphere."

"I should have been destroyed by the Fhinntmanchca," the Lady said. "The noosphere suffered devastating damage and, under different circumstances, would not have been able to support my existence. In fact, for a few heartbeats, I ceased to exist… was, in fact, dead. Again."

"Again?" Weezy said.

"The first death occurred in Florida. The Fhinntmanchca caused the second. A third time and I will be gone."

Weezy looked shocked. "Where does it say that?"

The Lady gestured toward the Compendium. "You will find it somewhere in your book. After the third death I will be resorbed into the noosphere."

"And that's it?"

"I will eventually reemerge, but as a child. And in the interval, my beacon will be extinguished. That nearly happened this time, but because the Internet has made the noosphere so much stronger than the One or anyone else realized, I was able to return almost immediately, albeit without my companion."

Yeah. Her dog… Jack kind of missed him.

"I think it was more than just the noosphere," Veilleur said.

Weezy turned to him. "You think the Ally stepped in?"

He shook his head. "No. The Ally has minimal presence in this sphere. I sense that something else was involved in bringing you back. By all tradition, the Fhinntmanchca should have completely crippled the noosphere and blasted you into nothingness."

Weezy said, "Another player? Please don't tell me you think there's a fourth force at work here."

Jack didn't want another player either, but…

"Fourth?"

"We've got three now." She ticked off on her fingers. "The Ally, the Otherness, us."

"Us? I could see you saying the noosphere, but-"

"The noosphere is us-humanity. We created it, and it can't exist without us. It's not fighting for us, it's humanity fighting for itself." She looked at Veilleur. "You're not suggesting divine intervention or anything like that, are you?"

He shook his head. "Of course not. I think the Lady herself might have had something to do with her own return."

She frowned. "I don't see how that is possible. I am no one. I am simply a projection, an avatar of the noosphere."

That might be true, but Jack couldn't help thinking of the Lady as a person. She was all that stood between humanity and a takeover by the Otherness. She was a beacon, announcing to the multiverse that this place was inhabited by sentient beings. If she were snuffed out, the Ally would discard the Earth as worthless, leaving the Otherness to reshape this reality to its liking-a hell for humanity.

"No one?" Veilleur smiled. "No, my dear, I think you are someone. I think you are more than you realize."

She shook her head. "I know what I am and am not. I am no one. Without a healthy noosphere, I cannot exist."

"But the noosphere isn't healthy. You expected to be getting back to your old self by now, but that hasn't happened."