The latest wave of attacks stuttered to a halt. He hung in the blackness, trying desperately to think of a way to break the impasse. If he could only understand what he was fighting. . . ! Dark and angry as the thing seemed to him (he had struggled against such anthropomorphic characterizations for a long time, until he realized that by doing so he was underestimating the subtle unpredictability of his enemy), there was far more to the operating system than that.
The most immediate part of it, the security programming which was trying its best to kill him, was only one head of this particular Cerberus. Another head watched him and considered him while the battle raged—even seemed, in some paradoxical way he could only feel but not define or explain, to wish him no ill. He could not help wondering whether the security system responses were something over which the operating system as a whole had almost no control, just as an ordinary human could not consciously control his own immune system. This second head, he guessed, was the part of the operating system which had achieved something like true intelligence. It must also be the part that let children like Cho-Cho into the network unharmed—for how could a mere security system know whether a human user was a child or not?—and which avidly followed his volunteers through the network.
There was a third head, too, Sellars sensed, a silent one that was turned away from him, but what it thought about—what it dreamed?—he could only guess. In some ways the third head frightened him most of all.
A new wave of defensive blitz began with no warning, a violent all-out burst that swept him up like a hurricane and for long minutes pushed all considerations but mere survival from his mind. Again he felt it trying to reach into his very mind. The attempt failed, but Sellars knew that if the stalemate went on long enough this damnably bizarre and clever machine was going to find a way to subvert his defenses. He began to wonder just how long he had been here in this no-place, wrestling with Cerberus.
After he had weathered the storm and had snatched a few seconds of much-needed rest, he accessed his own system long enough to discover that almost a full day had passed since he and Cho-Cho had first contacted the network. An entire day spent fighting for his life! No wonder he was exhausted.
In the real world it was already Sunday afternoon. He was running out of time. If the system killed him, or if he killed the system, he would fail. He needed to find some other way. His only hope was that Olga Pirofsky and Catur Ramsey could place the data tap and that the Grail network information would somehow provide answers.
No, he told himself, not just answers, but a solution to this impossible problem.
But he could not even afford to check in on their progress until he had weathered at least one more round of attacks by the security systems. He had stolen moments in the earliest lulls to make a few emergency calls and to find and activate vital defensive gear, but he needed far more time than that to deal with the data tap.
The next assault came quickly enough that he was glad he'd waited. It was as violent as any of the others, but even as he fought off the multipronged attempt he thought he sensed something different this time, a slight lessening of what he could only think of as the resolve behind the attack. When he had suppressed all but the most basic of the security routines, the ones that could be safely left to his own built-in defenses, he prepared to turn his attention to what was happening in the J Corporation tower. But just before he shifted to his own system and his connections to the real world he stopped and hesitated in the darkness, troubled by something he could not name.
That hesitation saved him. The attack that followed mere instants after the defeat of the last was the most savage so far, not just a redoubled assault on his connection but a concentrated, many-fronted attempt to break down his resistance to the more subtle and more devastating physical feedback. For long moments he could actually feel the thing reaching for him down the connection, a monster just on the other side of a splintering, flimsy door, and Sellars knew real terror. The blackness of no-visual became another kind of blackness, an endless void in which he was lost, isolated, pursued.
He held on somehow, and when the probing, searching thing touched him at last he was even able to send a jolt of resistance back down the partially opened channel. He was certain that he felt the nonphysical presence flail in pain and surprise, then the entire attack was suddenly withdrawn.
The beast had limped back to its cave.
His heart and respiration spiraling up to near-critical levels, his mind reeling at what he'd just felt, but desperate to take advantage of whatever time he had bought himself, Sellars left his automatic systems in place to warn him of a new attack, then slid back into his own system.
His beloved, carefully-nurtured interface, the Poetry Garden in which he had spent so much time, tending, planting, pruning, simply being, was all but gone now. It had been replaced by a mutant tangle of activity, a sprawling chaos of data root and virtual vine in which only he could have discerned even a trace of order.
He took a moment to issue some crucial messages and set a few small works in motion, then turned his attention to the slender black sapling that had sprung up at the edge of the sea of vegetation. Three vines had crept up its dark verticality, climbing to a surprising height. He knew what two of the creepers represented, but about the third, its livid, unnatural color and texture more like plastic piping than vegetable, he was less sure. Sorensen? It seemed odd the Garden would represent him in such a way. With foreboding, Sellars made a connection.
Like a phantom he listened in on Catur Ramsey's conversation with Olga and although he shared Ramsey's worry about her, and even debated cutting in to echo Ramsey's warning, the larger and more pressing issue of the data tap would not allow it. He did permit himself a brief moment of amusement at the identity of the third vine. Orlando Gardiner's software agent! What an idea—but a good one. Working together, somehow they had found a way to install the data tap. Sellars found himself admiring and liking Ramsey even more, and Olga, too. He wished he had more time to get to know them both. It was unfortunate that he was probably not going to be alive long enough to do so.
He quickly turned his attention to the data tap, accessing Beezle's captured visuals to carefully examine the linked array of knowledge engines that seemed to power the Grail network. Even without knowing their exact nature and location he had suspected what the software agent had now confirmed and had arranged with the people of TreeHouse, among other resources, to make sure he had the processing power to cope with the influx of data. He checked and then rechecked his already labored calculations. He whispered the prayer which had accompanied him at takeoff on every flight. He opened the tap.
The Garden exploded.
It was too much information—beyond imagining. The constraints of his Garden burst and dissolved, the models incapable of keeping up with the flow. Within a heartbeat his entire system was teetering on the brink of collapse. When that happened, he knew, everything would be lost. He would be trapped in the blackness of the Tandagore coma without even an online existence, or helpless before the next defensive cycle of the operating system. Everything would fail. Everything.