Spirits in the Wires (10 page)

But not a real forest, not even a video pretending to be a real forest like at the Wordwood site. Instead it was like someone had gone into a stretch of woods and sprayed a thin sheen of metallic paint onto everything. All around him the leaves and branches, the undergrowth, every blade, every leaf of every plant, was metal and ore. Gold and silver and steel. Copper and iron. Burnished and gleaming, but also rusty and black. When a branch brushed a wafer-thin leaf, sparks flew. Thousands of tiny firework displays were discharged whenever a breeze came sighing through the trees.

Underfoot, when he kicked at the metallic plants and dirt, the ground was made of circuit boards and wires.

And there was the voice.

He remembered hearing a voice, a quiet, murmuring voice, talking to him, but either he was just out of range, or it was speaking in a language he didn't understand, because he hadn't been able to make out a word of what it was saying.

No, that wasn't true. In amongst the gibberish he could distinguish two words, repeated so often they might have been on a loop.

Find
…
can't find
…
can't
…
can't find… find
…

And though the volume of that voice had never risen, he remembered an urgency in it.

What couldn't be found?

He rubbed at his face. His eyes felt gritty, his mouth too dry. He had another drink of the flat soda, then got up and went into the washroom. He ran the water until it was cold, then bent over the sink, splashing it on his face.

The metal forest flickered on the back of his eyelids every time he closed his eyes or blinked. The breeze remained constant in his ears, like radio static now. The sense of being watched by whatever was in among those trees was stronger than ever, as though the watcher was looking for something.

Can't find
…
can't
…

He stared at his face in the mirror, wondering, what couldn't be found? Was the thing in the forest looking for him? Or was he just going crazy?

He turned away and went over to his computer work station, turned the computer on.

He knew when all of this had started. When he'd sent that e-mail to the Wordwood site. Maybe he could stop it by sending another. He couldn't think of anything else. He just knew, if he didn't do something soon, he really would go crazy.

The e-mail he composed was short and to the point. He confessed to the virus he'd sent and included instructions on how to remedy the damage it had caused. When he was finished, he queued the e-mail and called up his dial-up window. Once he was on-line, he pressed send.

He knew that it would take hours, if not days, for the Wordwood's Webmaster to be able to fix the damage that his virus had done, but he opened his browser and aimed it at the Wordwood site anyway. The “This page cannot be displayed” message appeared almost immediately.

As he started to close his browser, the page on his screen shivered. He held his hand still on his mouse. The browser page shivered again, then a ripple ran from one side of the screen to the other and a small black dot appeared in the center. When the dot began to expand, Jackson let go of the mouse and pushed back from his computer station.

It reminded him of a pupil. As though his monitor was an eye, and the expanding dot was its dilating pupil. Looking at him. Directly at him.

The static breeze in his ears grew louder. He wanted to shut off the computer—at least go off-line—but the truth was, he was scared to even touch the machine now. It was all just too weird. His hacker's paranoia was operating at full throttle—who's watching me, who knows, what will they do? He remembered all the supernatural voodoo talk about spirits in the Net that got talked about in newsgroups and when he got together with his computer friends.

What if those spirits weren't locked into the Net? What if they
could
get out? What if they were
already
out?

Something was screwing around with his hearing.

Something was making him hallucinate—flashes during the day, dreams of metallic forests.

He didn't want to think about it. Don't articulate your fears, he'd heard once, or you might make them true. But he couldn't help it. How could he help
not
thinking about it?

Something
was
watching him.

He could feel its presence, even if he couldn't see where it was hidden. He didn't know what it was. He couldn't say if it was in his computer, or somewhere in the room with him, but it existed. The animal part of his brain, the part that operated on pure instinct, could sense its interest in him. It woke a pin prickle of warning at the nape of his neck that made the little hairs stand up and sent nervous twinges snaking down his spine.

And something
was
exerting a physical effect upon him.

The static breeze grew louder in his ears. Every time he blinked, the forest tattooed on his eyelids left a residue of its presence in his vision. The expanding eye, staring at him from his monitor, filled the screen until his monitor went black. Then something else started to happen.

He rolled his chair closer to his desk, leaning in to look at it.

Condensation appeared to be forming on the outside of the screen— dark drops of some sort of oily liquid was beading on the glass, then running down the surface of the monitor in trails to drip from the bottom onto his desk. Jackson reached a finger to touch one of the drops. Before he could, the static in his ears swelled into a roar. His monitor changed from a machine with a glass screen to an open window and a flood of the thick liquid came gushing out. It was as though his monitor had become the portal of a sinking ship already under the surface of the ocean.

He jumped up and back, sending his chair skidding, then lost his footing in the black pool that had already formed around his desk. He went down, flailing his arms.

Impossible. None of this was possible.

He mind refused to accept what was happening, but his animal brain fully believed and was in a blind panic.

When he tried to get back on his feet, the liquid was too slippery for him to find purchase. He fell again, face first into the liquid, and came up spluttering. He turned and caught a face-full of the oily liquid as it continued to gush out of the monitor.

Down he went again.

The force of the liquid pushed him in a tumble toward the door. He felt as helpless as he once had as a child, falling into a stretch of rapids while fishing with his father. His father had plucked him out of the water then, but there was no one to do that here.

He hit the door with enough to force to take the wind out of him and fell face forward into the goopy liquid again. It was almost a foot and a half deep now and showed no sign of letting up.

The static breeze in his ears had grown into a dull roar. Dimly, beneath its static rasp, he heard the voice from his dreams.

Find
…
can't find
…
can't
…

He managed to grab hold of the door handle and haul himself up above the surface of the liquid, his feet still skidding from under him as he tried to stand. He spat to clear his mouth, but the goop clung to his gums and his teeth and the roof of his mouth. Getting a good grip of the door handle with one hand, he used the other to wipe at his face.

He froze when his hand came in front of his eyes. With numb fascination, he realized that he could see right through it as though he were fading. Or coming apart.

High school science classes came back to him, some teacher droning on about how everything was made up of molecules, constantly vibrating. Linked to each other to form matter.

Linked …

It was like the links that held him together were dissolving as surely as had the ones on the Wordwood Web site when he'd infected it with his virus.

This couldn't be happening.

Except he could see right through his hand. He could—

His other hand lost its grip of the door handle. Or did it simply go
through
the door handle?

It didn't matter anymore.

As he sank into the liquid, he could feel himself being absorbed by the black goop, molecule by molecule, all the links that held him together fading away, no longer able to do the job they were meant to do.

The last thing he thought was, if a Web site has a spirit, this must be what it feels like when a virus takes it down …

To: “holly rue”

Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2000 22:38:19 -0700

From: “thomas irwin pace”

Subject: WW down?

Hey Holly

Quick question: Have you been able to log on to the Wordwood site lately? I haven't been able to connect to it all week long, and it's not just me. Everybody I've talked to says the same thing. I don't think it's been on-line since Monday—at least that's the last time I was able to connect. Wasn't a great connection either. Pages took forever to refresh. No real-time dialogue with whoever's running the site these days. All the streaming video and sounds were down.

Any ideas?

Tip

P.S. Aiden says you'll really like Monkey Beach by Eden Robinson. She wrote that collection Traplines a few years ago, remember?

Holly hadn't been able to connect to the Wordwood all week either, but she hadn't considered that the site itself might be down. She'd simply assumed it was yet one more problem with her own service provider. CyberCare had been great when she'd first signed up with them a few years ago, but the ISP's service had been getting dodgier ever since, especially over the past couple of months. She was seriously considering switching ISPs, for all the hassle that would entail in terms of having to move her store's Web site and change its Internet address.

After rereading Tip's e-mail, she tried to log on to the Wordwood again herself and received the same message she'd been getting all week:

This page cannot be displayed.

She stared at the useless screen, wishing her partner Dick was as good at solving computer problems as he was at keeping the bookstore tidy. She was hopeless with either. She used to think she was pretty good at keeping the store neat and running smoothly all on her own, but that was before she discovered she had a hob living behind the furnace in her basement. A real hob, mind you, like in a fairy tale. Not some little man pretending to be one.

Dick Bobbins wasn't much more than two feet tall with curly brown hair, large dark eyes and a broad face creased with laugh lines. He now lived in her spare bedroom. He was the one who kept the store so shipshape, spending his evenings dusting and filing new arrivals, organizing and straightening the books on the shelves, and generally being more efficient in one day than Holly could be in a week. Though he'd share a cup of tea and meals with her, he really seemed to get his sustenance from the books he read.

Holly had no idea how that was even possible, but she supposed when it came to logic, magic marched to its own drum.

She hadn't even realized that beings such as Dick existed until she first met him a year or so ago. He'd been her own secret fairy-tale housekeeper—so secret, even she hadn't known he lived with her. And when she did find out, it seemed that real life followed the fairy tales when it came to hob lore—thank them, or give them a gift, and off they'd go. Dick had his bags all packed and was sneaking out the door until she made him an offer of partnership in the store. Ever since, she'd felt guilty because Dick worked so hard while she continued with her usual slow-mo puttering. But it was hard to
make
Dick relax. He loved to read, of course, and he read prodigious amounts of books. Which
is
why he'd chosen her store as a residence in the first place. But his idea of relaxing was endlessly dusting, sweeping, tidying, cleaning …

Fairy-tale being or not, Dick was definitely suffering from an obsessive-compulsive disorder.

She'd given him a book on the subject, but after reading it, all he said was, “Yes, Mistress Holly, that's me all right,” and kept right on doing it. She guessed that breaking him of the habit of leaving a place after he'd been thanked was at least a good start—she'd just have to work on this compulsive need to be constantly cleaning. Though, really. If it was left up to her own haphazard approach to store maintenance, she didn't want to think what the place would look like.

“What do you think, Snippet?” Holly asked, turning to look at her Jack Russell terrier. “Am I taking advantage of him the way Christy says I am?”

Snippet regarded her with one eye and gave a desultory kick at the air with a hind leg. All it would require was the smallest hint of encouragement and she would bound up from the front display window where she was lying and into Holly's lap. When Holly returned her attention back to the computer, Snippet gave a heavy sigh.

“Oh, I'm not forgetting your walk,” Holly said over her shoulder. “Just let me answer Tip's e-mail.”

What could have happened to the Word wood?

Anything, she realized. Almost from the first—when she and Tip, Sarah, Benjamin and Claudette had first started it up—the site had been one anomaly after another.

They'd all attended Butler University together, going their separate ways after graduating. Still, they'd stayed in touch—with e-mail it was easy—and got together whenever they could, which usually worked out to be once or twice a year since they all still had family in Newford. It was at one such get-together a number of years ago that they hit upon the idea of putting together a site specializing in literature—which had quickly gone on to encompass writing of all kinds as they couldn't agree on what should or shouldn't be considered literature.

The initial vision was to collect as many bibliographies, biographies, and public domain texts as they could, sharing the storage space on their various servers, linking to other sites such as Project Gutenberg and First Chapters to save themselves from having to input information that already existed elsewhere on the Net.

They soon had an enormous surge in enthusiastic help from e-mail correspondents across the globe, making suggestions, pointing out errors, e-mailing new links and material. The Wordwood quickly grew from a hodgepodge of a Web site—a personal vision brought to life and existing on five separate servers—to something else again. Something they couldn't have predicted and still didn't understand.

For the site took on a life of its own.

It didn't happen overnight—or at least they didn't realize it overnight.

First they began to find texts on one or another's servers that none of them had put up. This shouldn't have been possible since, like most Web sites, theirs was password-protected and only the site owners were supposed to have access. Initially, they treated it as an anomaly, something that the more computer literate among their number tried to figure out in their spare time, but nothing they actually felt they needed to worry about.

“Strange things happen on the Net,” Sarah, the real computer guru of the site's original founders, liked to say. “There's all kinds of voodoo in cyberspace. Ghosts and spirits, haunting the wires.”

The unauthorized text additions didn't become a real problem until copyrighted material began to show up. Not wanting to be sued—and besides they had a healthy respect for the rights of authors, two of their number making their living as writers—they removed this material as soon as they became aware of it. But to no avail. It would simply reappear.

And then the storage sites disappeared from their servers.

You could still access the material by pointing your browser at
www.thewordwood.com
, but the Wordwood site itself now existed in some impossible limbo in between computers.

That's where magic happens, Christy had explained to her. Not here or there, but in between the two.

Holly was uncomfortable with the word magic, but there was no other word to explain what had happened with the Wordwood. It was now possible to have real-time conversations through the site with somebody who always seemed to be on-line, no matter what time of day or night you accessed it. More curiously, this somebody's style of communicating often echoed the voice and conversational mannerisms of someone the user had known. In Holly's case it was her grandmother, five years dead.

The Wordwood grew in enormous leaps and bounds, bibliographies and texts appearing on it at a prodigious rate. The copyrighted material all had some sort of complex protection on it so that while you could access it on-line, you couldn't read a work in its entirety, and you certainly couldn't download it.

If you tried, the Wordwood cut off your access to it. A message of explanation appeared on your screen:

You have attempted to access copyrighted material beyond what is considered fair use. For that reason your privileges on this site have been terminated.

You lost a week's access for a first offence. A subsequent attempt to download copyrighted material barred you from the site permanently. And there was no getting around it. Logging on with a different user name, or even from someone else's computer using their I.D. and protocols, made no difference.

Sarah was unable to explain it.

It wasn't simply a text-based site anymore, either. The opening splash page had a background of what appeared to be real-time video now. It depicted an impossible forest, inhabited by the sorts of things you'd expect to find in the woods—squirrels and mice, songbirds and insects—but there were odder creatures in it as well. Sometimes you caught glimpses of hybrid beings—an owl with a man's face, a chipmunk with tiny human hands and fingers, a woman with moth wings. Or there were people that, when you saw them in context with a robin or a red squirrel, say, appeared to be no more than six or seven inches high.

The trees in the forest weren't of any species anyone could recognize— a simple enough feat if they'd simply been created on a computer and then animated. But Sarah said their details were too complex and random for animation—even with today's CGI technologies—and swore there were no loops in the video streaming. What they saw in the Wordwood's opening screen was real-time video—although real-time video of what forest, or where, she couldn't say.

And now it was gone.

Holly turned away from the computer and looked out the store's front window. She should be putting out the stock that had come in today— before Dick took it upon himself to do it for her—but she couldn't seem to muster the energy. Saturday was always a busy day in the store and today had been no exception. Helpful though Dick was behind the scenes, he left it to her to deal with the public. There were times today when it had gotten almost frantic, there were so many people in the store, each with a question, or wanting their purchase rung through, or change for the bus, or wanting her to go through their want list and recommend where they could get this or that title if she didn't have it in stock.

Many customers didn't seem to understand that in the secondary book market, she could only carry what people brought in to sell or trade. She couldn't simply order a book for them from Ingrams. Well, she could, but it would be a new book and they'd expect to buy it at a used price, and that wasn't going to happen in this lifetime. At least not in her store.

Most of the time, the book they were looking for was long out of print.

“How can it be out of print? I love this book.”

She heard variations on that at least once a week, if not more, and wasn't unsympathetic. There were times when she, too, felt that a particular book being out of print was a personal affront. Still, there was nothing she could do about it except to explain the vagaries of the secondary book business and do a search for the book if the customer wanted her to, both of which took up time.

Dick didn't help with the on-line customers either, though he was happy to package the books to get them ready for Holly to take to the post office. Though that still left Holly working into the evening answering e-mail on days like today, when it had been too busy to get on the computer during store hours.

But she was almost finished now. She patted her lap and Snippet rose from her bed in the front display window and jumped onto her.

“Hey, you,” she said, scratching the little dog behind the ear. “Just let me send these e-mails and we'll go for that walk.”

The browser window explaining that the Wordwood site wasn't available was still open when she turned back to her computer.

Maybe the pixies were causing this current problem, Holly thought. They were certainly the reason that Dick wouldn't go near the store's computer. He was too afraid that they'd come bursting out of the screen once more to wreak havoc and mischief up and down the blocks neighbouring the store as they had the last time.

If Holly hadn't seen them with her own eyes, she might not have believed that they could exist. But she had. And they did. Though she didn't know why she should be so surprised. After all, she had a hob for a business partner. And then there was the whole mystery of the Wordwood …

Send the e-mail, she told herself. Go for a walk and then to bed.

She started to reach for her mouse, to bring the window with her e-mail program back on screen, then stopped. Something was happening in her browser window. Right in the middle of the screen, a small black dot had appeared. As she watched, it began to expand like the eye of a camera. On her lap, Snippet lifted her head. Whining, she returned to the window seat. An inexplicable uneasiness came over Holly.