Alan Foster - Exceptions to Reality

“For God’s sake, don’t drop that!” Rumford’s round pink face had turned white.

Hayes frowned at the metal box, infinitely sturdier than the usual plastic container. “Flash drives can handle shock. What’s the problem?”

“Just don’t drop it.” Carefully taking the container from the bemused agent, their host opened it slowly. Spitzer was surprised to see that it contained only one silvery KeyDrive. Mumbling something under his breath, Rumford slipped this into the appropriate socket on his main machine. The drive did not, Hayes observed, automatically identify itself.

A couple of clicks and a macro or two later, and the monitor filled with a jumble of symbols and words that were unintelligible to the two agents. Working with grim-faced determination, their host began to use his mouse to methodically highlight specific sections. These were then cut and copied to another page, where he proceeded to carefully position them over an intricate template of symbols. After some twenty minutes of this, he sat back and double-clicked. Immediately the monitor began to pulse with a rich red glow.

Spitzer observed the vivid visual activity with interest. “Java applet?” he wondered aloud. “ActiveX?”

Rumford shook his head. “Not exactly.”

“Nice animation,” the agent continued, watching without understanding what was going on. “Bryce or something from SG?”

“My own code. I correspond with people with similar interests. There’s a guy in Germany, and interestingly, a woman in R’yleh—sorry, Riyadh. We play around with our own software. Closed-source. It’s kind of a hobby within a hobby.”

Hayes indicated the monitor. The intense, swirling, necrotic colors had given way to the more familiar instant-messaging screen format.

What do you think you’re doing? You think you can trouble me with this?

“What did you do?” Spitzer leaned even closer, dominating his surroundings. “Send him a virus?”

“Something like that,” Rumford replied noncommittally. In his server, the flash drive continued to blink softly even though no eldritch colors or patterns were visible any longer on the monitor.

Wait—what’s going on?

A pause, then,

Stop it…stop it now! You can’t block me. I’m not waiting any longer. Just for this, I’m going to post the first chapter right now !

Hayes tensed, but their host did not appear overly concerned. He just sat staring, Buddha-like, at the screen.

What is this? Make it stop—stop it now, I’m warning you! Rumford, make it stop! You sonofabitch bastard, do something!

A chill trickled down Spitzer’s broad back as the words appeared on the screen. The flash drive, he noted, had stopped blinking.

Make it go away! Rumford, do something now! I won’t post—I’ll do anything you want. Make it go away! Rumford, please, don’t let it—oh god, stop it now—please, do someth

No more words appeared on the screen.

Sighing softly, Rumford leaned back in his chair and rubbed his forehead. He looked and sounded like a man who had just driven several fast laps around an especially bumpy track. “That’s it.”

Hayes made a face. “That’s it? What do you mean, ‘that’s it’?”

Turning away from the monitor, their host looked up at him. “It’s over. He’s not going to post anything. Not now. Not ever.”

The chill Spitzer had been experiencing deepened. “What did you do? Where is he? What did you send him? ”

Rumford rose. “Something to drink? No? Well, I’m thirsty. Nasty business, this. You need to tell those people at Harvard to be more careful. They really ought to burn the damn thing, but I know they won’t.” He shook his head dolefully. “Book people! They’re more dangerous than you can imagine.” He eyed Spitzer.

“It doesn’t matter where he is or was. I took care of the problem. He can’t post a ‘you’ve got mail’ note, much less an entire book. Much less the Necronomicon.”

Realization dawned on Hayes’s face. “You got into his machine! You wiped the copy!”

Rumford nodded. “In a manner of speaking, yes.”

Spitzer was not impressed. “Unless this Wilbur was a complete idiot, he made at least one duplicate and stored it somewhere safe.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Rumford reiterated. “He can’t make use of it. Just take my word for it.”

“That’s asking a lot.” Spitzer studied the smaller man. “How can we be sure?” He indicated his partner. “We have responsibilities, too, you know. This isn’t a hobby for us.”

Their host considered. Then he pulled a KeyDrive from a box in a drawer. An ordinary box full of ordinary drives. Slipping it into an open socket, he entered a series of commands. In response, the computer’s hard drive began to hum efficiently. Moments later the flash drive ejected. Carefully, very carefully, Rumford removed it, slipped it into a protective case, and handed it to Hayes.

“Here’s a copy of the program I used.” His eyes burned, and for an instant he seemed rather larger than he was in person. “You might think of it as an anti-virus program, but it’s not intended for general use. It’s very case-specific. You’d be surprised what can be digitized these days. If someone like this Wilbur surfaces again, you can utilize it without having to come to me.”

Hayes accepted the drive and slipped it into an inside coat pocket. “Thanks, but I couldn’t make sense of anything you put up on screen.”

Rumford smiled humorlessly. “Just press F-one for help. There’s an intuitive guide built in. I had it translated from the German.” He brightened. “Now, let’s have something cold to drink!”

Later, in the cab on the way back to Grand Central to catch the express back to Washington, while their Nigerian driver cursed steadily in Yoruba and battled midtown traffic, Hayes pulled the KeyDrive from his pocket. It was a perfectly ordinary-looking drive, rainbow-reflective and silvery. Their host had hastily added a few explanatory words to a piece of notepaper he had passed to Hayes just before the two agents had departed.

“You really think he dealt satisfactorily with that Wilbur person?” Spitzer asked his partner and friend.

Hayes shrugged. “Unless this was all some kind of elaborate hoax.”

The other agent grunted, and his belly heaved. “Better not let Morrison hear you say that. Not after we pressed for the time and expense money to come up here and do the follow-through.”

Hayes nodded, absently scanning the notepaper. “If it wasn’t a hoax, at least we won’t have to come up here again. The instructions for making use of this are pretty straightforward.” He had no trouble deciphering Rumford’s precise, prominent handwriting, which he proceeded to quote to his partner.

“‘To download Shoggoth,’” he began thoughtfully…

Basted

Theme anthologies force a writer to think about subjects that are often, at most, of passing interest. For example, it’s hard to imagine writers of fantasy who have not at one time or another in their lives gone through a spell of fascination with ancient Egypt. There is simply so much of that great civilization that inspires, from its art to its technological developments to its incredibly long lineage. It is a fascination that persists to this day in films like the modern Mummy and its sequel and humankind’s continuing obsession with the afterlife. Not to mention the alien science that helped to raised the pyramids—though one would think that any civilization with the knowledge to shortcut such massive construction would prefer a more modern building material than rock.

Ah well. Some of the mysteries of the Pharaohs must remain forever as inscrutable to us as their preferred hairstyles and their penchant for being portrayed in profile. They have even given us a word for it: sphinxlike.