Alan Foster - Cyber Way

Still, he was measurably relieved when the door did not resist Ooljee’s touch. Behind them the room was filled with a booming whu-whu-whu sound, a deep-throated electronic pounding. It was interrupted frequently by the first sharp cracklings and snapping noises of overloaded circuits. Above it all echoed the plaintive wail of the wall phone.

Suddenly Ooljee pointed to the original monitor. While the rest of the screens were awash in incomprehensible psychedelic babble, it had turned a calm cool green, a verdant field on which throbbed a single flickering

word:

WORKING

Working, Moody mused wonderingly. Working at what? He would not be spooked. There was a reasonable explanation for whatever was happening. As soon as they could shut everything down, recovery specialists would run a trawl on the mollysphere web and figure out exactly what had occurred.

The whu-whu-whu sound in the room was now accompanied by a faint rush of air that sounded like hahowa hahowa. It was a most peculiar electronic counterpoint.

Ooljee thought so too. “You hear that?” The detective nodded. “That is really strange.”

“Why? We’ve got a room full of visual garbage. Why not aural as well?”

“It is strange because I do not think it is garbage. I think I know what it is. At least, I remember hearing something like it when I was a kid.”

Moody turned on him, more uneasy than he would have cared to admit. The pounding, pulsing sounds that filled the room meant nothing to him. He began to wonder if his colleague was starting to extrapolate upon reality, or to put it another way, crack under the strain of what he’d inadvertently committed.

“We’ve been in this hole long enough. The weavers will work it out. That’s what they’re paid for.” He put a big hand on the sergeant’s shoulder, pushing him toward the elevator. “Let’s get some air.”

Explosive cracklings drowned out Ooljee’s mysterious electronic mumbling. Moody glanced back over his shoulder. Wisps of smoke were beginning to appear in the room. “Shit. That’s all we need.”

They reached the elevator, had to wait impatiently for it to descend from the main floor. A small screen set in the wall to one side of the lift-controls was flashing figures and diagrams at them. Abruptly and without any warning they were replaced by words. Ooljee stared dumbly at the screen on his spinner. The words were repeated there, and for all they knew, on every screen and monitor back in the room. All around them the first smoke alarms were beginning to howl.

With the far darkness made of the He-rain over your head Come to us Soaring

With the far darkness made of the She-rain over your head Come to us Soaring

With the zig-zag lightning flung out on high over your head Come to us Soaring

With the rainbow hanging high over your head Come to us Soaring.

It flickered on the wall monitor, blinked back at him from Ooljee’s screen. It made sense in and of itself, but not to him. As they entered the elevator their ears were assaulted by a rising electronic thunder, rumbling and spitting ominously. It pursued them up the shaft.

The doors parted, letting them out on the main floor. Smoke alarms were wailing everywhere. People were gathering up mollysphere backup cubes and printouts and personal effects as they raced for the exits.

Ooljee allowed himself to be led, his expression dazed. Moody got directions from an officer hurrying past them. His arms were piled high with cubes and boxes of holo-mages.

The sergeant finally looked at the man dragging him along. “You read it too, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, I read it. What is it? Something from the local Top Forty?”

“It’s from the Nightway. Part of a long chant addressed to the Thunderbird. You have heard of the Thunderbird?”

“Yeah, sure.” Moody plunged into a crowded corridor. There was a lot of smoke in the air now, acrid and eye-stinging. People were starting to cough. Down below, something was burning.

The external security doors had been flung aside. No one was checking idents now. Moody stumbled down the stairs leading to the street, nearly fell as a percussive blast rocked the station behind them. A thin tongue of orange flame licked through a window flanking the doorway. Sweat poured down his back. For an instant he thought he heard that strange electronic pulsing, whu-whu-whu, hammering away in counterpoint to hahowa hahowa. Then he realized they were only echoes of what he heard earlier, down below.

Except for the flames vomiting from the station windows and the indifferently drifting advertising holasers shrieking the virtues of cigarettes, deodorants, autos and vidshows, restaurants and hotels, it was pitch dark outside. Night-shift personnel and a few late-roaming curious civilians were gathering in groups, trying to assist each other, trying to help, trying to make sense of what was happening. A few stood alone or in twos, gawping dumbly at the building.

Moody pushed through the swelling crowd. He was not in the mood to talk to anyone, in any language. Right now he was more concerned with protecting his partner and assessing his mental state. No one confronted them. Probably no more than one or two people knew that Ooljee had been direct-accessing the system’s mollyweb. No one shouted at them to stop.

He did not see the bolt strike the uplink dish atop the precinct house, but was sure that he heard it above the screams of those who did. It melted the upper two-thirds of the big antenna and left the remainder smoking like fried fish bones. The thunder of its passing was replaced by the mournful song of approaching fire engines as one city department raced to the aid of another. Later, much later, a few witnesses would insist that the lightning had been full of color, like a shard of jagged rainbow, instead of simply a normal bright white.

Ooljee had been staring past his friend and had seen it hit. The color of it lingered on his retinas. Thunder and lightning continued to torment the night sky, but the building was not struck again.

The fire department arrived just as the rain began; steady, hard, and cold as an iceman’s tattoo. An exhausted Moody slumped to the sidewalk. The droplets chilled his neck and back. He pulled his jacket up to protect his head.

His partner sat beside him; legs crossed, hands resting on his thighs. Together they observed the flaming, smoking scene as men in uniforms very different from those of the late-night refugees scattered to their work.

Aware he was breathing too fast and that his heart was working too hard, Moody struggled to slow both by concentrating on something else. He glanced uncertainly at his colleague.

“I don’t suppose you can explain this?”

It took the sergeant a moment to react. Only then did he regard his paler, larger companion through the falling rain.

“If it is a step-by-step reconstruction of events that you want, I can’t help you. I cannot help myself. We know that the departmental web built some kind of program based on a fractal template derived from a portion of the Kettrick painting. We know that after it reached a certain point, it began running itself, because we were unable to shut it down. Some kind of mutation took place within the mol-lysphere. It went on autoplait, or whatever you want to call it.”

Moody nodded slowly. “All of which is patently impossible, because the work Grandpa Laughter created dates from a time when nobody knew about such things.”

“Quite so.” Ooljee continued to stare at the burning building. “Then there is the matter of the sounds we heard. ”

“Yeah. You said you recognized some of it. It was just noise to me.”