Oblivious, unseeing and uncaring, Moira finished rubbing herself down and accepted the shift and long, fur-lined black robe from her shambling attendant. Then she sat as the decaying creature tenderly but clumsily pulled on her boots. Warmth is important to human health as well.
"Okay," E. T. Tajikawa said, "there’s part of your problem."
Jerry, Bal-Simba and Moira all crowded around the table. Jerry squinted at the glowing letters over the Tajmanian Devil’s desk. Some of them were the conventional magic notation used for writing spells in the code compilers. Others were odd symbols he had never seen before. The result made no sense at all.
Squatting underneath was the demon the code fragment manifested.
It had a nasty sneer on its face-or at least on its top, Jerry amended. The thing sat on six spindly legs like a demented version of a Lunar Lander. The main body was cylindrical and semi-transparent. Inside were vague outlines of something coiled into a long spiral. The top, where the face was, was a regular geometric solid, a dodecahedron, he realized after making a quick count of the edges on each surface.
"What the heck is it?"
"It’s a virus," Taj told him. "You’ve got an infection in your system."
"Holy shit," Jerry breathed. "But how?"
Taj just shrugged.
Jerry tore his eyes away from the demon and examined the spell more closely.
"Does that make any sense to you?" Taj asked.
Jerry just shook his head. "For one thing it’s not entirely in standard magic notation. More than that, well, it just doesn’t make a Tot of sense. What does it do?"
"It attaches itself to a spell and starts shifting instructions around or combining them."
Jerry bit his lower lip. There was something terribly wrong with this but he couldn’t quite put his finger on what yet.
"Could it be a weapon?"
"If it is it’s a piss-poor one. The thing’s not very destructive and it’s hardly hidden at all. It doesn’t poly-morph and if you know the sequence you can grep it out of any spell it’s in."
Everyone was silent for a moment.
"There’s something not right about this," Jerry said
That appears to be an understatement," Bal-Simba said mildly.
"No, I mean there’s something really wrong here. Something we’re missing." Moira cocked her serpent-like head. "Another of your premonitions?"
"More like a feeling, but yeah. That sort of thing."
Moira furrowed her scaly brow. She had been more intimately associated with the programmers than Bal-Simba or any of the other wizards and she knew Jerry’s knack for spotting problems even if he couldn’t quite grasp the whole.
"You’ve never had a virus here before?" Taj asked.
Jerry shook his head. "Now that it’s happened I can see how it could, but no."
"Hmm," Bal-Simba said, staring at the glowing letters. "Do you think it is related?"
"Directly? No. But I suspect it’s a manifestation of the same kind of underlying phenomenon. Sort of the fundamental particle of your problem."
"And it works by sticking stuff together," Jerry said in an effort to forestall the inevitable. "Let me guess, you call this a glue-on, right?"
Taj brightened. "Hey, that’s a good name for it"
"Me and my big mouth," Jerry muttered. "Anyway, it still doesn’t explain who our enemy is."
"What about," Taj said slowly, "the possibility that the glue-on arose naturally? It’s not very complicated. Only about a dozen basic instructions."
"I suppose that’s possible," Jerry said equally slowly. "Like I say, we’ve never seen that. But we really haven’t been here long."
"Where do you suppose all these complicated magical phenomena come from?"
"Around here that’s like asking why the sky is blue. They just are."
"The sky’s blue for a reason," Taj pointed out.
"It’s something we never really wondered about."
Taj smiled, looking more satanic than ever. "Those are the ones that get you in the worst trouble."
While Jerry chewed on that Taj went back to wandering about the room restlessly, looking at things without quite seeing them. He came to rest in front of Danny’s magical fish tank and suddenly froze like a bird dog coming on point. The rainbow denizens of the tank were oblivious to him, but everyone else in the room was suddenly watching him intently.
"Those fish aren’t natural, are they?"
"No, that’s something Danny was working on for his son," Jerry told him.
"Do they change?" he asked in a peculiar voice.
Jerry frowned, remembering his earlier misgivings. "Yeah. He made them so they’d change over time. They kinda mutate."
"But they don’t follow a pre-programmed pattern?"
"I don’t think so."
Taj turned back to the fish tank and stared fascinated.
"Bingo!" he breathed softly. "Oh, boy howdy!"
"You’ve found something?"
"Alfie."
"Huh?"
"Alfie-A-Life, you know artificial life."
"What do you guys know about artificial life?"
Jerry shrugged. "It only got hot after we came here. We’ve been following the newsgroups on the net."
"Its a very rapidly developing field."
"As good as its hype?"
Taj snorted. "Get real. But they’re still getting some interesting results, especially with evolutionary systems." He paused. "What’s more, I’ll bet your enemy isn’t ’someone’, it’s ’something’-the mother of all artificial life programs."
Zombie army ants. The phrase flashed in Jerry’s mind.
"Meaning the thing’s not alive?"
Taj shrugged. "Define ’life’ and I’ll tell you. What it definitely means is that you’ve got stuff breeding out there."