Spin State - Chris Moriarty [168]
Though any speed she could muster was meaningless, she hurried. The call went out. The dedicated line on the Starling lit up like a distant star in the darkness.
First ring.
No answer.
“Come on, Cohen. Be there!”
Second ring. Li felt the AI rising up like a great beast, flexing its computational muscles, gathering its immense bulk to flick off the irritating mote that was her.
“Don’t do this to me, Cohen!”
Third ring. And the Zed was on top of her.
It spun through its security operations so fast that the whole dataspace became an incomprehensible dizzying blur. Li was sinking, spinning. She knew she should jack out, but she couldn’t navigate the system, couldn’t orient herself or even control her own body. Code twisted and convulsed as the Zed overloaded her systems. Her internals froze, jerked, skittered off course. The datastream corrupted. Her own mind, unable to process the overload, betrayed her. She began to hallucinate. The numbers came alive. They pulsed with a cold, deep-sea wakefulness. A mind moved within them, dark, sightless, unsleeping. A mind without words. A mind forged in the pressure of a hundred atmospheres. It circled, searching for her. Stalking her. And she knew with bone-crushing certainty that when it found her she would die.
Far away someone else’s body convulsed and a stool skittered across the deck, wheels shrieking. The phone rang again, but the external datastream was so slow and uncompressed next to the Zed’s dizzying parallel calculations that the ring reached Li’s brain only as a low, Dopplered groan. Even the white noise on the line stretched out until each click and rasp of static became a distorted howl. The darkness within the darkness gathered itself and slid toward her.
Click.
She sensed Cohen’s arrival more than she actually saw it. A river of light washed through the numbers, driving back the darkness. It shone white, as pure and deceptively placid as the sweep of a Himalayan ice field. But it was crushing the Zed, cutting through the semisentient as implacably as a glacier grinding at a mountain. If she’d ever wondered what it was to be the scrap of flesh two sharks fought over, she knew now. She felt . . . nothing. She heard only her pulse pounding in her skull, and behind that a rushing, whirling silence. She was lost, floating, watching from a tremendous height while two battling giants tore apart the universe.
The lab comp writhed and twisted, desperately spinning through its programs in search of anything that would blunt Cohen’s relentless attack. Then it focused on her, and an icy finger of fear brushed down her spine.
03:42:12. The next thing she saw was Cohen. Not the implacable and terrible light, but his normal on-line self. He was running the numbers, doing the job he always did, the job any cracker did. She waited, still weak. There was something comforting about watching him dial through the comp, watching the security codes untangle themselves under his touch and the numbers smooth out and tick past easily, the way they always did for him. Something was off though.