Olga made her way up and down the rows as though led by her own outstretched hand, past what had to be billions of credits worth of gleaming machinery. First five, then ten minutes ticked away as she trudged along, her arm aching and stiffening. She could not help wondering if the firefighters were in the building now, and how long it would be until the security guards were back at their screens. Twice she stepped over things that suggested employees had been here recently but had vacated in a hurry—an expensive-looking, very small pad abandoned in the middle of a row, still fiberlinked to a port, and twenty meters away the shattered remains of a coffee cup and a puddle of gently steaming liquid.
She had just found a third artifact, a shapeless piece of synthetic fabric that she guessed might be some sort of clean-room headwear, when Beezle said, "I think that's it, boss."
She looked up to where her fist was pointing and saw a tower of components little different from many others, except that there seemed to be a greater-than-average number of huge fiberlink bundles snaking down into the floor conduits. "This?"
"It's worth a try," Ramsey said. "Will anything bad happen if you're wrong, Beezle?"
"The building might blow up. Just kidding."
"Funny," Olga said dully. The weirdness was beginning to get to her, not to mention the idiot voice still droning out the escape location warning.
"Sorry. Orlando likes stuff like that." This nonexplanation issued, Beezle began to give her instructions on where to place Sellars' mystery box. As before, she minutely changed its position several times until her instructor—Sellars the first time, Beezle this time, and if Beezle was gear, then what the hell was Sellars? she wondered—seemed satisfied; the box clicked, vibrated briefly, and adhered.
After a few long moments of silence Olga began to feel panicky. "Are you still there? Catur?"
"I'm here, Olga. Beezle, is it the right machine? What do you have?"
The silence again, but longer this time, much longer. Ramsey called Beezle several times in mounting anxiety. Only when almost a minute had passed did Beezle come back.
"Whoa," he said, his voice more than a little distorted. "I wish I could swear, but like the lady pointed out, I'm a children's toy. This is un-friggin-believable."
"What?" Ramsey demanded.
"This place is carrying the dataflow of a major city, I kid you not."
"Which city?"
"Not a real city," Beezle grunted. "Don't be literal. I'm just talking about how much throughput there is. Amazin"! There's a whole light farm on the roof of the building—a laser array like you've never seen, pumping data up, readin' it comin' back. Weird, too—some kind of boosted cesium lasers according to the schematics. You want me to do some research?"
"Not now," said Ramsey.
"What is it?" Olga wondered. "All this data—is it this Grail network I have been told about?"
"Don't ask me." Beezle sounded almost surly. "I'm not up to this. You just can't understand the quantity of data ridin' through here."
"But didn't this Sellars make any provision. . . ?"
"Look, lady, I don't know what Sellars had planned. He sure didn't leave any notes about what he was going to do with this if he tapped into it. And even with all the upgrades and extra processing power Orlando rigged up for me, I can't begin to make sense of it—you might as well try to run all the UN Telecomm data through an abacus!"
For a toy, Olga thought, he sounded quite convincingly overwhelmed. And he had an admirable way with metaphor as well. "So what do we do? Mr. Ramsey?"
"I . . . I guess we've done all we can," the lawyer said. "Until we can contact Sellars again. Beezle, are you sure you can't, I don't know, hook up enough processing power to make some sense of it—any sense at all?"
The agent's snort was answer enough.
"Right," said Ramsey. "Then I suppose we really have done all we can. Good work, Olga. We'll just hope it all comes to something—that Sellars gets back to us and that he had some idea of what kind of processing this would take." Catur Ramsey did not sound entirely convinced. "So we might as well get you out. . . ."
Olga looked around the massive room. "Not yet."
It took Ramsey a moment to hear what she'd said. "Olga, that place is going to be swarming with firefighters and cops soon, not to mention J Corporation security. Get going!"
"I'm not ready to go." A calm she had not felt in hours, perhaps days, descended on her. "I didn't come here in the first place just to put in some vampire-tap or whatever your Sellers called it. I came here because the voices told me to come. I want to know why."
"What are you talking about?" He had gone from irritated to panicky and was swiftly moving on toward something even more extreme. "What the hell are you talking about, Olga?"
The alarms were still going, both the distant wordless pulse and the empty female voice. "I'm going up to the top," she said. "Where this terrible man lives. Uncle Jingle's house, I guess you could call it. Uncle Jingle's lair."
"Wow." Beezle manufactured a whistle. "You really are crazy, lady."
"Actually, it's probably true," she said, perfectly happy now to be talking to a piece of code. "I spent a. long time in a sanitarium when I was younger. And recently—well, we all know what it means when you hear voices in your head."
"You're hearing voices in your head right now," Beezle pointed out.
"Yes, you are right. I'm getting used to hearing them." She turned and began to walk across the impossibly wide room toward the elevator.
"Olga, don't!" Ramsey was desperate now. "We have to get you out of there!"
"And I am getting quite good at ignoring them, too," she added.
It was a little easier now, but not much. He didn't feel like he was dying quite so quickly.
For the hundredth time, thousandth time, he had no idea, Sellars repulsed an attack and still managed to hold open his connection into the Grail network. With all the experience he had gained from this horribly protracted encounter, as well as from his earlier incursions, he was still amazed by how the thing reacted.
He floated, bodiless, in a darkness that seemed alive with malice. Now that he had survived the original blaze of resistance the secondary attacks continued to come in waves, the timing random. Sometimes he had almost a whole minute to consider and plan, then the assaults would resume, storm following storm, and his every thought was once more focused on survival.
He had learned from his previous connections that there was more to the system's defenses than merely the technical countermeasures, however sophisticated. It could manufacture all the traces, blowbacks, and disconnection attempts that he expected from top-of-the-line gear, attacking and defending and then counterattacking so quickly that it was like fighting war in space at light speed. But there was a purely physical side, too, perhaps the same thing responsible for the Tandagore illness: during each attack he could feel the security system reaching not just into his system but into him as well, trying somehow to manipulate his autonomic responses, to slow or speed his heart rate and respiration, to reprogram his neural circuitry.
But Sellars was not an unsuspecting child stumbling into the jaws of a hidden monster. He had been studying the system a long time and had modified his own internal structures until most of the grosser attempts to manipulate him physically could be routed down harmless pathways, their force wasted on buffers almost as a lightning rod drew away the deadly force of electricity. Even so, as long as he was trapped online, struggling with the network's defenses, he had to remain completely disconnected from his physical self so his old, worn body would not pull itself to pieces in seizure. The security system might not be able to kill him yet, but neither could he disengage from it without losing contact with Cho-Cho, and he could not let one more innocent disappear into the darkness at the heart of the system—he had too many such sins on his conscience already. And although the operating system was clearly weakening, probably failing, he could not hope for that kind of release, since its ultimate collapse would probably also doom those who remained online. Sellars and the system remained locked together, neither able to let go, failing enemies trapped in a death dance.