Out of the Black - Lee Doty [59]
On the screen electric milk moved in deeply layered fractals. The patterns shifted in syncopation with the complex lattice of the music. He pushed his mind into the patterns. In his mind's eye, he saw the patterns stretching off the sides of the screen, extending in a sphere around him, finally joining behind his head. He floated inside a continuum of blending sound and light, stretching outward into the synaesthetic patterns. Soft, lemon-flavored electricity crawled over his skin in time with the joining patterns of sound, light, and thought. He let his eyes lose focus as he focused on a component of the beat that hid layers down. He let it expand until it was the primary sound he heard, felt, tasted.
There was a tingle of final anticipation and then he fell. Inward. Downward. Behind his eyes, below his feet, inside his bones, the complexities of the Underworld unfurled and he exploded out into its light. Ivo liked to call this place the world's utility crawlspace. Here, the plumbing and wiring of the "real world" could be seen- could be manipulated.
And so, washed of the things of the world above, he approached the Loom. Far away it seemed the music changed, but this was a caress on a sleeper's face, unfelt in the dream. He had work to do.
Ivo had been teaching him a Cast that he called "Brownian Dissonance"- with Ivo it had always been about the polysyllabic. The point of the Cast was to overwhelm an electronic device with a randomly distributed series of dissonant pseudomagnetic fields.
He started with the template for that Cast, attempting to change the amplitudes of the vibrations, tuning them to harmonize with metal. He then accessed the template for a Cast that affected ferric pliancy, which was the first Cast Ivo had taught him- the spoon-bender. He took these two simple Casts and began to knit them together, combining their purposes. It seemed to take forever to get the patterns integrated. Fortunately, here in the Loom, time was stretched thin. Here, seconds could stretch on for what seemed like minutes.
He didn't want to think about the odds of a novice successfully contriving an ad-hoc Cast like this. It was dangerous and probably wouldn't work, but it was the best he could do.
Passion and focus- Ivo said these were the keys to all interaction with the Loom. Alex had focus in spades. It was medde him so good with computers. Of course, you didn't really need passion to create fractal security algorithms.
To this point, Alex's greatest work had been the Forge of Rae's cameo. Even Ivo had been impressed. It had taken him forever, but when Rae was involved, Alex found he had more passion than for any of Ivo's assignments. Rae's life depended on his work now. All of their lives did. The trick was to turn fear into passion, rather than paralysis.
He put just a little power through the conjoined weave. He then quickly found the frays and misflows and quickly reincorporated the problem sections.
This was not going to work.
He remembered long ago Ivo saying that it was easier to destroy than to create- this was his only hope. This Cast was more like a drunkard brandishing a chair than building a fine piece of weaponry. Forging Rae's cameo had taken about four months to get right, but today he had only seconds.
Quickly, he Cast the weave of Vision and saw through the eyes of the Loom just how desperate things had become out in the archive. Rae and the Detective had made a decent accounting for themselves, but he could see they didn't have long to live. One of the assassins whipped around the end of the row of shelves where the Detective was crouching. Not yet!
In the pristine speed of the Loom, Alex saw the Detective move in the glassy smooth slow motion of action movies. Ping changed the geometry of his crouch, shifting his weapons ever so slightly. The assassin's finger was still tightening on the trigger of his assault weapon when three bullets from the Detective's twin guns tore through his chest.
Shifting his view quickly to Rae,