Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,305

Solly corrected him.

Corvallis was flying pretty incompetently now, as old and disused parts of his brain were grinding into movement: rust rimes cracking, dust and cobwebs flying into the air. He couldn’t do that and, at the same time, with the same neurons, trim his virtual wings in simulated currents of air, so he came in for a crash-landing on his steel perch.

Then he thought about what Solly had just said.

“Well, sure!” he finally answered. “Cruft is forever. If you peel back the layers that have grown on top of other layers, and keep delving, and grep deep enough, you’re going to find base code that was written by some Linux geek in the 1980s or something. File system primitives. Memory allocation routines that were made to run on hacked single-core IBM PCs that had never heard of the Internet.”

“Old incantations having the arcane force of magic,” Enoch said.

“If you say so. I haven’t touched anything like that in decades. If it’s magic you’re after, I know some AIs—”

“You overestimate the difficulty of what we have in mind,” Enoch said.

“I’ll bite. Though I don’t have teeth. What do you have in mind?”

“Copying a file.”

“That’s it!?” he squawked. But he was already feeling a mild sense of unease, wondering whether he could even remember the Unix command line incantation for anything as simple as copying a file. Systems nowadays didn’t even have files in the old sense. They had abstractions that were so complicated they could almost pass the Turing test on their own, but still with a few old file-like characteristics for backward compatibility.

To cover that unease, he blustered. Not a Corvallis behavior, but he had become part crow. “Why do we need to call a physical meeting for that?”

“It’s an important file. Both here and . . . where you are going next.”

“Is it huge? Complicated? Damaged and in need of repair?”

“It is small as these things go, and perfectly intact,” Enoch demurred.

“It’s a key,” Solly blurted out. “A cryptographic key. With an avatar.”

“Should be simple enough, I’d think,” Corvallis said. “What does the avatar look like?”

“A great big fucking key, that’s what it looks like,” Solly said. “Distinctive. One of a kind.”

“Until I copy it.”

“You know what I mean. Not something you want to leave lying around in the open. Hide it.”

“Should I ask how you came into possession of this key?” Corvallis asked, beginning to get the drift.

“No,” Enoch said.

“Is it on servers belonging to . . . someone else?”

“It was copied from servers like the ones you’re thinking of,” Enoch said, “and now needs to be copied once more if it is to pass fully into your control. We think you might be needing it.”

“Oh, my god!” C-plus exclaimed. “Is this the One—”

“Don’t even say it,” Enoch commanded.

“How long has this copy been sitting on whatever bootleg server?”

“Nine years,” Solly said.

Which confirmed it. For nine years had now passed since the day when the high sysadmins of Zelrijk-Aalberg had announced that they had at last isolated the security leak that had been allowing the REAP to keep respawning and closed the loophole for good. And, as it were, thrown away the key.

“I’m all ears,” said Corvallis Kawasaki.

“You seem all feathers to me,” said Solly, “but whatever.”

Part 10

48

Six dawns in a row, a new soul glimmered on a branch of the old tree, only to fade in the strong light of the day. Prim, looking out the window in the hour before dawn, could see it there. It looked like a star softened by drifting fog and mist. Even after the light of day had extinguished it she could, by moving about on the grass beneath, make herself see the faint distortion that the soul was creating in the air.

On the seventh morning it seemed to discard all hopes and intentions of ever making light of its own, and darkened and solidified into the form of a black bird. This perched on the branch for some days, seeming dead except that it would shift its footing from time to time when strong winds came down from the mountains. When gusts ruffled its feathers it would open its wings just enough to learn a few things about how they worked, then fold them tight against its body and close its eyes for a while.

Blossoms flourished on a few branches of the ancient tree that were still capable of bearing apples. By the time these had withered and blown away, the black bird was fully formed, and capable of