Alan Foster - Cyber Way

There was much less spiritual baggage to deal with in the modem kitchen. He waited while his host connected the home molly mounted on the counter to the police spinner on the table. The home unit would supply just enough web for their needs.

After rechecking his connections, Ooljee activated the small zenat which hung on the far wall next to the refrigerator and ran an autobraid through the portable’s entry-board. Colorful abstract patterns flashed across the monitor.

The sergeant gestured toward the home molly. “I have installed an autointerrupt box between the unit and my spinner. If either approaches overload, everything will shut down automatically.”

“You hope.”

“Is Florida populated exclusively by optimists these days?”

Moody forbore from pointing out that the safeguards at the station were infinitely more sensitive and effective than the discount-store special Ooljee was relying on. On the other hand, their little kitchen experiment had the virtue of simplicity. There was only a single cable to worry about, and no potentially troublesome optic connections.

The sergeant sat down next to his spinner like an old-time projectionist preparing to unspool cinematic magic. He muttered an order and the household fluorescents obediently darkened in response. Moody found himself staring not at the zenat but at the nearby refrigerator. It was wallpapered with childish scribblings lovingly carried home from school, awkwardly posed holomages, cheap decorative magnets, and gaudy plastic flowers. It reminded him powerfully of the family he did not have. Irritated, he returned his attention to the monitor.

Ooljee’s fingers danced over the spinner board. The zenat cleared, its surface a bright, cheerful green.

“I think this will be okay, now that we have some idea of what to expect.”

“Do we?” Moody was standing behind him, looking over his shoulder.

“We have the example of the previous night. I am going to make essentially the same requests of the home web that I made of the bigger one at the station, only I am going to run it at one-twentieth the speed congruent with an interrupt program, which I hope will react at the critical moment and bring everything to a halt so that we will have time to note exactly what is taking place.”

“What if the template program ignores all your instructions and we get a straight-up replay?”

Ooljee gestured at the kitchen counter. “There is a large, wood-handled meat cleaver in the first drawer to the left of the sink. If both my programmed and on-line interrupts fail, take a good swing at the cable. That will be just as efficient at halting the flow of mutational information, if a little more expensive.” He grinned. “One never forgets how to make use of low-tech on the Rez.”

Moody tensed as he stared at the zenat. The spinner had commenced the same inexplicable fractal sequencing which had taken control of the police station molly web. The monitor was alive with the fractal flow, colors and patterns racing past too rapidly to comprehend. Ooljee’s preparations and precautions notwithstanding, the sequence appeared to be running as fast as before. He couldn’t be certain, though. When reproduced at high speed, even the simplest fractal patterns could be disarmingly mesmerizing.

There were no additional screens in the kitchen to come to life, however; no high-density readouts to belch forth incomprehensible figures, no tattle-telltales to warn of impending web failure. Just as there were no heavy-duty backup devices to come on line if the web they were using suddenly tried to expand beyond its proscribed boundaries.

As the sequencing progressed in the absence of smoke, flame, and spark, he relaxed a little. Behind him, uninvolved kitchen appliances hummed quiescently.

“It is replicating,” declared Ooljee tersely. “It’s mutating again. But this time we have it under control. Sometimes less is more.”

“We can’t be sure of that. What about this building’s maintenance-and-service molly? Are you sure it’s isolated?” If that began to smoke and blaze, Moody mused, they could look forward to an interesting time trying to deal with it from their position near the top of the tower. “We’d hear an alarm. At least we know we are on’ the

right track, that what happened last night was not a fluke. The yellow sand in the Kettrick painting generates a reproducible template. It is working just as well, maybe better, on this system as it did on a much larger one. What I do not understand is why it works and what it is supposed to do. If we knew that, we might be able to make use of it, to direct it. Surely it was not designed to keep expanding until it self-destructs.”

The kitchen molly whirred softly, the zenat was bright and silent, and Ooljee’s fingers occasionally fiddled the board of his spinner. It was motionless in the room except for the unending transformation the program was working on the surface of the zenat. Perhaps because it was so scaled down everything seemed less frantic, less out of control than it had at the station. Whatever changes Ooljee had made prior to and concurrent with entering the program appeared to have had the desired effect. They had tamed the template.

The last thing Moody expected was for the seemingly ceaseless rush of images to slow down. However, that was exactly what was happening. As they watched in fascination, the runaway fractal forms began to mutate less and less rapidly, taking on the aspect of recognizable shapes and symbols, until the schematic that took final possession of the monitor shone calm and unchanging back at them from the far wall.

It was determinedly Euclidian. It was quite attractive.

It was a sandpainting.

Not the Kettrick. Something different, figures and shapes organized around a black circle flanked by four curving colored bars. Outside the bars, angular silhouettes clutched a profusion of unidentified objects. The figures were surrounded by additional symbols and devices. If any of it had been created using colored sand, Moody decided, it had to have been very fine sand indeed. The painting displayed no granular texture whatsoever.

A jagged border stuck through with arrowheadlike points surrounded and enclosed the design on three sides. The open end faced the refrigerator. Faced east.

“Pretty,” he commented. “What’s it supposed to represent?”

“Who can say? We need a hatathli here, or somebody from the museum. All I know is what I remember from when I was a kid and what I have picked up while working on this case. That is not a lot.”

“Why’d you call it up instead of the Kettrick painting?” Ooljee glanced back and up at him, his face lit only by the glow from the monitor. “I didn’t bring it up. The template program generated it.”

“Y’all telling me that it did all that processing just to show us another sandpainting that we also don’t know nothing about? Shee-it, my friend, I’m a patient man, but I have my limits too.”

Ooljee hardly heard him. He was entranced by the image on the screen. “Some kind of semi-Mobius program. Begins with a painting and ends with one. Look at it this way, Vernon: it is better than smoke and flames.” He glanced uneasily at the interrupt box he’d spliced into the cable linking his spinner to the kitchen unit. The single warning LED glowed a comforting, steady green.

The frustrated detective relented a little. “I suppose so. What do we do now? Go find ourselves a medicine man? Or an art catalog?”

Ooljee rose and approached the monitor. With a finger he traced the jagged border. “This is a lightning guardian. I doubt it has anything to do with what we witnessed earlier, but it is kind of nice to see it here.” His finger spiraled inward. “I do not recognize any of these yei figures. The feather designs are all wrong. So are the heads. They should be rectangular for female yeis, round for male. Not like this. Perhaps whoever originally drew them was trying to be funny.”