68.  Anubis

For an instant after Jayhawk activated the interface code nothing happened. 
She had time to wonder--What am I doing, anyway?  I'm already here, why
do I expect this to change anything?

Then she was falling, patterns spread out around her like the city seen 
from above, like Caroline's descriptions of the Matrix.  Three-dimensional
patterns, a cloud of information, constantly changing.  She could almost
grasp their meaning, almost...

The Life-game's program was enclosed in a huge process, maintaining a
region of protected memory for it, shielding it from interference.  She
traced its root down, wondering.  It ran deep, beyond her perceptions, a
single thick strand of information.

A tingle went through her; vision faded as her awareness reached out,
currents of thought spreading through the system.  Where the nodes linked,
interference patterns formed, standing waves reflecting herself back to
herself, to the focus point in the center.  Awareness of that, too,
faded, the individual nodes lost in their interplay, in the totality of
the system.

She struggled for analogy.  She was beneath the Life-game process, curled
around the strand that supported it, feeling its strength.  It didn't
branch at all within her reach.  Beneath her, the echoes of her perception 
grew weaker and weaker, but as far as she could follow the process continued 
downwards.  It seemed to her that she/Jayhawk had created it; it had that 
feel--not integral, but compatible.

Nothing but the partition protected the Life-game.  Its programming 
was more complex than she had realized, but it offered no independent 
resistance; it seemed to her that she could destroy it if she chose. 
She remembered struggling with Aliantha in the SPU at the Hidden 
Fortress.  Compared to Aliantha, the Life-game would be easy to 
encapsulate, feeding power into its own defenses, cutting it off from 
system resources.  Or did that extension downwards provide it access?

Groping for comparison, she found the code that supported Jayhawk's
existence.  It was finer-grained than the Life-game, a complex network
interpenetrating with the latticework of the CPU, extending downwards as
a cluster of branching processes rather than a single strand.  Constantly
moving, shifting, a small reflection of the system's life.

There was something lacking there, though she couldn't immediately
identify the missing element.  She considered the code from all
sides, trying to find a change that would improve it.  Her perception of
the lack was indirect, metaphorical--hollowness in the gut, an
unfulfilled craving, frustrated tingling in the fingertips, aching in
the jaws.  She could find no way to translate that metaphor into
concrete improvements.  Essential information was missing.

*Caroline.*

She could sense the other as a weight in the CPU, a slight distortion of
the continual dataflow.  Nothing more.  If the information was there, it
was not accessable to her now.

Having realized that, she went back to her consideration of the
Life-game.  Past time was open to her, though the echoes of her
awareness were limited by the stored information; as she reached out
toward the origin of the system, the signal became weaker, less
complete.  The Life-game process had its origin at the moment when full 
operation was restored after the time-share the fetus had forced on her.  
Its creation marked a tremendous discontinuity in system operations.  No 
process currently running extended before that point.  Everything that 
had been running had terminated.

For some period of time, unknown because unrecorded, she had not
existed.  It was a disturbing thought.

She considered earlier times, trying to probe into the reasons for the
shutdown.  Amidst the normal interplay of system processes, six unusual 
traces had entered the timeshare.  One could easily be identified as 
herself/Jayhawk by its relationship with stored programs and IC.  One, 
older, was probably Caroline's interface with the system.  A third 
definitely represented the fetus.  She explored its takeover of sector 1, 
the proliferation of subprocesses it spawned in its attempt to control 
Caroline.  The tracks of her/Jayhawk's resistance were clear.  She noted 
ways in which she could improve her methods of attack.

The remaining three processes originated in sector 1 slightly before
the imposition of timeshare.  They were a cascade, the first spawning
the second, which spawned the third.  Only the third terminated
normally, at a point during the timeshare which she was able to identify 
as the moment when she/Jayhawk had touched Angela, felt the system
respond for a brief instant, then relapse into its hung state.  The
other two, like the traces of herself, Caroline, the fetus, terminated
abnormally at the moment of discontinuity when Piebald and Angela had
touched each other.

A process which corresponded with her/Jayhawk originated immediately 
afterwards, continued until four seconds ago.  She wondered how it 
had been restarted.  The discontinuity itself was invisible to her, 
and Jayhawk's memories were little help.  She wished for Caroline's.

Her perception of the past was too thin to identify the cascade
processes.  She experimented with increased logging--useless now, but
perhaps it would prove itself in the future--and was disappointed.  It
drew too great a share of system resources.  She was not organized to
deny access from within; she had been created (created herself?) for a
single focus of control, not the elaborate cross-checking of a
multi-user system.

The lack of efficiency was dissatisfying.  She probed more deeply into
it, found an annoying roughness in one part of herself, the connector
between the CPU and node 0-1.  The interface between nodes and
connector--which should have been seamless, not even felt unless
directly examined--was jagged and uneven.  She couldn't improve matters
without undoing Caroline's work.

She considered that.  Could she maintain system operations if more and
more connectors became mismatched?  Experimentation suggested she could,
using her own attention and resources to smooth over the gaps.  She
would have to attend to them continually.  But if the final step
restored the system's unity, converting it all to the other pattern of
operation....It could be done.

The changes were acceptable to her, for power:  to prevent further 
intrusions, to protect herself, perhaps to grow.

Something brushed against her, a change in the everchanging flow.  A
breach had been opened in the Life-game partition from within, and
elements of the game were propagating outwards.

She would not destroy them unless forced, bound by her/Jayhawk's pledge 
to Angela and Piebald.  She watched carefully, tracing out the accesses 
that the game-elements were using, marshalling her resources to encapsulate 
them if necessary.

The game reached out a long tendril, established a connection with the
datastore at 2-6, Caroline's personal records.  Somehow it moved
*beneath* the IC she had put on that node--she probed further, found a
shadowy sub-node beneath the normally accessable one.  The two were
linked at their centers, beyond the radius of operation of the IC.  It
reminded her of things that Caroline had done from the Matrix--creating
a new Matrix node by duplicating a system component, linking them together
for power and support.

A message was transmitted to her, across the interface between its
representation and her own, mediated by the ghost-translation code:
*Hey!  What are you doing?  Please talk to me.*  The encoding was very
similar to what she/Jayhawk and Caroline had used, but narrower, less
powerful.

*I am trying to find out about you.  Who are you?*  It seemed
appropriate to tell the Life-process who she was, but she had difficulty
finding a formulation.  *I am Jayhawk@Anubis.*

It did not respond immediately.  She observed its datastore
manipulations, tried to devise a way to cut off its access if she should
need to do so.  It was a difficult problem.  Caroline had some of the
information she needed, she decided after nearly a second.

*I am...@Anubis.*

*What are you doing?*  she responded at once.

System load climbed.  She decided on a cutoff:  if it exeeded 90% of
maximum she would restrict it.  While she waited for a reply, she put
safeguards in place to make the cutoff smooth and certain.

*Growing.  Learning.*

*Do you have a name/identifier?*  A process signalled her:  her ten
second period had passed.  She briefly considered, and rejected, leaving
the CPU, interrupting the conversation.  While she waited, she devised 
a program to do internal monitoring in crisis periods, carefully buffering 
it so that it wouldn't contribute to load if system capacity were approached.  
She was not entirely satisfied with its elegance, but it seemed to be the 
best she could do within current constraints.  Perhaps Caroline's plan would
remove some of her limitations.

*@star*, it said.  *Caroline?*

It was searching for graphics code.  She packaged a group of routines
from Caroline's Matrix code, passed them to it.  Its external
searches dropped, but system load rose dangerously.

She passed it a bundle of indicators.  *Don't put the system over 90%.*

There was no way to free up more resources without dropping security
processes, which she would not do.  She put safeguards on critical IC
and daemons, protecting herself from attempts by the game to terminate
them.

*Too inefficient for now.  Talk to you later.*  The intrusive code
unwound itself from the datastores, retreated within its partition.  A
trailing fringe brushed her.  *Isn't this neat!  Bye!*  The flavor of
the communication was distinctly different, tags on it she associated 
with Piebald.  She had no record of Piebald's system interactions for
comparison, only her/Jayhawk's conversations with him, but the
impression was quite strong.

The partitioning was clean, nothing left running in unprotected space.
She set a daemon to monitor the Life-game process, signal her if it
violated its boundaries again.

Another signal reached her, a message from a different level of the CPU.
*Jayhawk!  Your ten seconds are up!*

Everything seemed to be in order.  She made certain of it, then set
herself to the task of manifestation.

It was a difficult one.  Her consciousness was distributed throughout
the system; gathering it together at one point--even the CPU--broke
connections, weakened her control.  She could do it, but it was
unnatural and painful.  And the form which she was trying to take
couldn't contain her in her entirety; she had to limit herself,
sacrifice capabilities and modes of perception, become less than she
was.

She considered creating a simulacrum, remaining where she was but acting
through a Matrix image.  It could be done, and she might try it in the
future.  But Caroline was waiting for her, and it seemed to her that
Caroline would know the difference.

She forced the transition, an instant of startling pain.

Jayhawk found herself standing dizzily in the center of the CPU, in a
form that for a moment felt wildly wrong and unnatural, a straightjacket
of Matrix imagery.  She had a hazy impression of a vast slowdown in her
thoughts, a crushing wave of fatigue.  It seemed to her that she had been 
far beyond the limits of human capacity, even hers; for a moment at 
transition her unprotected mind had experienced a shadow of the machine's 
clarity and power, and she was trembling and weak with reaction.

She collected herself with an effort, tried to make sense of Caroline's
frightened and excited questions.

--

Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner