“Right. Deep down, you are your interface, ” he said. “In quantum mechanics, if a thing acts the exact same way as another thing, it is that thing. According to Bekenstein, you have no way of telling the ‘real me’ from a surface that absorbs and transmits the same particles.”
“So if you had a magic cave painting, there could be a whole world behind its surface,” I said. “ If you could paint it. But no one could paint a whole world down to its particles.”
“But they do in the movies, armies of Wookies on alien worlds,” Doug said. I started to protest, but he said, “In the computer, procedurally generated-simple rules that can be applied over and over again to populate a whole crowd and forest. But it takes millions of steps-”
“He can do that, and he doesn’t even need a computer,” I said, with a tingly ‘aha’ feeling. “He’s created graffiti that can draw itself-a self propagating intent, we’d call it.” I explained I’d seen it first with fire at the tagger’s playground, then at the Candlesticks.
“I strongly suspected that,” Doug said. “Lines of graphomancy that use mana to make more lines, one idea leading to another, a recursive pattern, unfolding forever, an infinite conceptual field. There’s no limit to how far magic can build on magic-”
“If you have the mana,” I said. “But he’d never get enough to create a whole world.”
“That’s where I’m going,” Doug said. “To link space, I think he’s using magic to create a ‘spin network.’ But a magic cave painting that held a whole world would take as much mana as creating a small universe. But if the cave painting mapped between two spaces-”
“If it was a gateway,” I said. “It’s a magical gateway.”
“Exactly,” Doug said. “If the painting is mapping points in one space to another, then there’s no need to create a whole world. All the geometry of the painting would need to do is create the map. That spin network could be atomically thin, magically thin.”
“That sounds like surface-to-surface link,” I said, “but Calaphase and I seemed to travel through an actual space, if a distorted funhouse version of one.”
“You can create arbitrary geometry with a spin network,” Doug said. “He could create a twisted little pocket space propped up by several tags. In fact, I’m guessing all the tags are connected together, like a network-and it will get stronger the more that are plugged in.”
“Jeez, Doug, that’s heavy grade magic,” I said. “How am I going to fight this shit? This guy is a Michelangelo of the genre. According to Drive, he could make his tags look like anything if he wanted to. Any reasonably sized tag could be one of his traps.”
“No,” Doug said. “You can fight it, because I can tell you what to look for. Jinx and I think the spin network will show up as some repeated pattern, like a grid or a spiral.”
“There is a spiral that’s like a grid,” I said. “There are coiling vines and barbed wire that showed up in almost every tag, looping tightly at the center to make a grid like a sunflower’s. It’s the vines, Doug, the spiral of vines. That’s your spin network.”
“Maybe,” Doug said. “I thought of that, but they don’t seem to cover the whole tag.”
“No, they don’t,” I said. Damnit. Every time I thought I had figured out how the tags worked, I ran into a brick wall. We thought it was graphomancy, quantum physics, whatever, but there were always missing pieces to the magic, like something… hidden beneath the surface.
And then it hit me. “He’s using multiple layers! I thought it was oil chalk, but Officer Horscht found an aerosol spray can. Spray painted graffiti isn’t like tattoos. It’s layers of paint.”
“I thought tattoos had layers too,” Doug said. “I’ve seen you go over designs-”
“To build up colors, but it all ends up as plaques of pigment in the dermis-a single layer that’s magically active. But we already know the graffiti doesn’t work that way.” I explained what Keif had explained to me about whitewashing the tags and using induction. “He can use several layers of paint to build up a pattern as complex as needed and we’d never see the whole of it-except the spiral of vines, which have to reach outside the canvas to pull someone in.”
“Right. And look for echoes. If it is a gateway, you’ll see echoes of your environment in the tag, and maybe distorted pictures of the target on the other end.”
“Like ghost images in a two-way mirror,” I said.
“It’s more like a television. The idea is simple, but the implementation is not,” Doug said. “There is too much physics involved. There is no way a backwoods graphomancer cooked this up on his or her own. None whatsoever.”
I was silent for a moment. “Like I said, maybe it’s hidden knowledge. Some ancient wizarding trick, developed in secret, hidden for centuries-”
“Maaaybe,” Doug said. “But I looked, Jinx looked, even you looked, and the three of us found bupkis. Now, maybe you’re up against an ancient cult of wizards, with magic beyond anything that I could find at the Harris School of Magic, or maybe some modern wizard with access to a physics lab. Or maybe, just maybe, it isn’t even human knowledge at all.”
“Not… human,” I said. “You mean like… vampire? Werewolf? Fae?”
“No,” Doug said. “The answer to your question combined thousands of years of magic and decades of study of the output of two-mile-long particle accelerators. I strongly, strongly doubt anyone just stumbled onto this on their own just dicking around. It would be like finding the design of a solid state laser in da Vinci’s notebooks, centuries before quantum theory.”
“Go back to the not human part,” I said. “If it’s not human knowledge… ”
“The graffiti links two spaces,” Doug said, “but the other side doesn’t have to be ours. ”
The Detective from Space
I spent the night in a box under a bridge halfway to Macon, Georgia. I had woven my way through the heart of Atlanta on surface streets, then risked exiting the Perimeter again on the highway, heading to Macon but intending to cut back towards Blood Rock.
The tingle as I went OTP was invigorating, but by the time I passed Stockbridge I was flagging. I turned off a few miles later, wound through smaller and smaller country roads until I found an industrial looking area with a small bridge running over a creek. I didn’t see any signs of trolls or other Edgeworld nasties, so I pushed the Vespa under the bridge, stole a box out of a nearby Dumpster, crept back under the bridge and into the box, and went to sleep.
Early, early the next morning, a truck running over the bridge woke me. I stretched, sore and cramped, and stood up. My neck hurt, my back hurt, and then both hurt more when I abruptly ducked down as I heard voices. After a moment the voices faded, and then I saw a couple of workmen walking down the road, turning in to the very place I’d stolen the box.
I leaned back against the bridge and took stock. I expected to feel sorry for myself, but I didn’t. Sleeping in a box had been cold and uncomfortable, but it had ended in a new day. Even the dingy, trash-strewn underbelly of the bridge was brightened by sun flickering off the burbling water. I saw a little scribble, near the abutment, stared at it curiously, and pegged it as a hobo sign-a graffiti precursor-that marked this place as a good rest stop. And it was indeed.
This too would pass, like the water slipping by in the stream.
“I can sleep in a box under a bridge,” I murmured to myself. “I can do anything.”
So my next step: get real help, and with all of my other contacts dry, that meant Arcturus. Of course, he didn’t answer, not after any number of rings, not after three calls. I don’t know why he even had a phone. And I certainly couldn’t call Zinaga.
I considered trying to slip in uninvited, but if my ‘banishment’ was real, the last thing I needed to do was show up at Arcturus’ door with a horde of vampires and vampire thugs on my heels. Heck, even if I did make it, the first thing Zinaga would do would be to sell me out.
Come to think of it, there was no guarantee Arcturus would receive me. Zinaga had tried to poison the well. What I really needed was something to get in his good graces. And for the man who eschews material goods… the best currency I could think of was a favor.