Charlaine Harris - An Apple for the Creature

Those chips were certainly down right now. Trey figured that Jonesy and Bird had gotten Anthem to call Trey for a bailout because she was so thoroughly a Bambi in the brights that even he wouldn’t actually slaughter her.

“Password?” He drew it into a hiss.

Anthem chewed a fingernail. Despite the fact that she painted her nails, they were all nibbled down to nubs. A couple of them even had blood caked along the sides from where she’d cannibalized herself a bit too aggressively, and there were faint chocolate-colored smears of it on the keyboard. Trey made a mental note to bathe in Purell when he got back to his room.

“Come on, girl,” he coaxed.

She blurted it. “Abracadabra.”

Trey stared at the screen and tried very hard not to close the laptop and club her to death with it. He typed it in. The display changed from the bland log-in screen to the landing page for The Spellcaster Project.

The project.

It sounded simple, but wasn’t. Over the course of the last eighteen months the group had collected, organized and committed to computer memory every evocation and conjuring spell known to the various beliefs of human culture, from phonetic interpretations of guttural verbal chants by remote Brazilian tribes to complex rituals in Latin and Greek. On the surface the project was a searchable database so thorough that it would be the go-to resource. A resource for which access could be leased, opening a cash flow for the folklore department. And, people would definitely pay. This database—nicknamed Spellcaster—was a researcher’s dream.

Trey found it all fascinating but considered it immensely silly at the same time. He was a scientist, or becoming one, and yet his field of study involved nothing that he believed in. Doctors at least believed in healing, but folklorists were a notoriously atheistic lot. Demons and gods, spells and sacred rituals. None of it was remotely real. All of it was an attempt to make sense of a world that could not be truly understood or defined, and certainly not controlled. Things just happened. Nobody was at the controls, and nobody was taking calls from the human race.

And yet with all that, it was fascinating, like watching a car wreck. You don’t want to be a part of it but you can’t look away. He even went to church sometimes, just to study the people, to mentally catalog the individual ways in which they interpreted the religion to which they ascribed. There was infinite variation within a species, just as within flowers in a field. And soon he would be making money from it, and that was something he could believe in.

The second aspect of the project was Spellcaster 2.0, which began as Trey’s idea but along the way had somehow become Professor Davidoff’s. In essence, once the thousands of spells were entered, a program would run through all of them to look for common elements. Developmental goals included a determination of how many common themes appeared in spells and what themes appeared in a majority, or at least a significant number of them. The end goal was to create a perfect generic spell. A spell that established that there were some aspects to magical conjuring that linked the disparate tribes and cultures of mankind.

Trey’s hypothesis was that anthropologists would be able to use that information, along with related linguistic models, to more accurately track the spread of humankind from its African origins. It might effectively prove that the spread of religion in all of its many forms stemmed from the same central source. Or—as he privately thought of it—mankind’s first big stupid mistake. In other words, the birth of prayer and organized religion.

Finding that would be a watershed moment in anthropology, folklore, sociology and history. It would be a Nobel Prize no-brainer, and it didn’t matter to Trey if he shared that prize, and all of the fame and—no doubt—fortune that went with it. Spellcaster was going to make them all rich.

“Okay,” Trey said, “why are we here?”

Anthem chewed her lip. She did it prettily, and even though she was the wrong cut of meat for Trey’s personal tastes, he had to admit that she was all that. She was an East Coast blonde with ice-pale skin, luminous green eyes, a figure that could make any kind of clothes look good and Scarlett Johansson lips. Shame that she was dumber than a cruller. He was considering bringing her into his circle; not the circle-jerk of grad students to which they both currently belonged, but the more elite group he went clubbing with. Arm candy like that worked for everyone, straight or gay. It was better than a puppy and it didn’t pee on the carpet. Though, with Anthem there was no real guarantee that she was housebroken.

The lip-chewing had no real effect on him, and Trey studied her to see how long it would take her to realize it. Seven Mississippis.

“I’ve been hacked,” she said.

“Get right out of town.”

“And they’ve been in my laptop messing with my stuff.”

“The spells?”

“Some of them, yes.”

Trey felt the first little flutter of panic.

“I’ve been inputting the evocation spells for the last couple of weeks,” Anthem explained. “One group at a time. Last week it was Gypsy stuff from Serbia, before that it was the preindustrial Celtic stuff. It’s hard to do. None of it was translated and Professor Davidoff didn’t want us to use Babelfish or any of the other online translators because they don’t give cultural or—What’s the word?”

“Contextual?”

“Right. They don’t give cultural or contextual translations, and that’s supposed to be important for spells.”

“ Crucial is a better word,” Trey murmured, “but I take your point.”

“I had to compare what I typed with photocopies from old spell books. After I finish this stuff Kidd will add the binding spells, then Jonesy will do the English translations. Bird’s doing the footnotes, and I guess you’ll be working on the annotations.”

“Uh-huh.”

“At first Jonesy dictated the spells while I typed, but that only really worked with Latin and the Romance languages because we kind of knew the spellings. More and more, though, I had to look at it myself to make sure it was exact. Everything had to match or the professor would freak. And there are all those weird little symbol thingies on some of the letters.”

“Diacritical marks.”

“Yeah, those.” She began nibbling at her thumbnail, talking around it as she chewed. “Without everything just so, the spells won’t work.”

Trey smiled a tolerant smile. “Sweetie, the spells won’t work because they’re spells. None of this crap works, you know that.”

She stared at him for a moment, still working on the thumb. “They used to work, though, didn’t they?”

“This is science, honey. The only magic here is the way you’re working that sweater and the supernatural way I’m working these jeans.”

She said, “Okay.” But she didn’t sound convinced, and it occurred to Trey that he didn’t know where Anthem landed on the question of faith. If she was a believer, then that was a tick against her becoming part of his circle.

“You were saying about the data entry?” he prompted, steering her back to safer ground.

Anthem blinked. “Oh, sure. It’s hard. It’s all brain work.”

Trey said nothing to that. It would be too easy; it would be like kicking a sleepy kitten. Instead he asked, “So what happened?”

Anthem suddenly stopped biting her thumb and they both looked at the bead of blood that welled from where she’d bitten too deeply. Without saying a word, Anthem tore a piece of Scotch tape from a dispenser and wrapped it around the wound.

“Every day I start by checking the previous day’s entries to make sure they’re all good.”