Read Online Cybermancy by Kelly McCullough - Free Book Online

Shara double-checked it herself.”
    “She did?” I asked.
    “She did.”
    “Well then where the hell did she go?” I asked.
    “I don’t know,” said Melchior. “Shit. The oath.”
    I could feel sweat breaking out on my forehead. I’d always figured that if I could get in and out of the underworld alive, I’d have this caper pretty much sewn up. The possibility that I could be both alive and in violation of my oath had never even occurred to me. Yet here I was. And if Shara didn’t show up mighty quick, I was going to have some unhappy Furies making a house call.
    “Melchior. Laptop. Please.”
    He hopped onto the desk and shifted shape. I dropped into a chair and started hitting keys. It was at times like this that I most missed the tip of my left pinkie. The loss had cost me a couple of words a minute typing speed. Still, I got a graphic representation of the mweb connections between Hades and this DecLocus’s version of Harvard up pretty quickly.
    There were an infinite number of possible routing solutions to get a set of packets from there to here, but only a couple of optimum solutions. For a job the size of Shara, the mweb master servers would be very careful not to take unnecessary steps. The network had bandwidth beyond the wildest dreams of human coders, but it had been designed always to optimize that resource—the hand of Necessity there.
    By hacking the tracking system at Clotho.net I was able to get a lock on one big mother of an e-mail coming out of Hades and heading by direct link from there into the Fate’s central routing system . . . where it vanished. Poof! No more packets.
    “What the . . .” Cerice was looking over my shoulder. “Where did she go?”
    “I don’t know,” I answered, madly hitting keys and calling up further information. “She hasn’t been erased or quarantined. There’d be some evidence of that. She’s just gone.”
    I pushed my chair back from the desk. I was trying to sound calm. I actually sounded dead, which was fair. I was dead. I’d escaped the Furies once before because I’d gotten very, very lucky. It wasn’t likely to happen again.
    “Don’t give up yet.” Cerice took my place in front of Melchior.
    His screen shifted, displaying nothing but ones and zeros. I prefer a nice clean graphical interface for computer and spell work. It’s closer to the way I think. Cerice goes straight into the underlying code, and she’s used her own personal magic to enhance her abilities there. Sometimes I think she’s half computer herself. Screen after screen of binary flew by so fast it blurred into complete nonsense for me.
    “There!” she cried, bring the show to a stop. “Right there.” Her finger touched the screen, and Melchior obligingly magnified that section of code.
    I didn’t know what was around it, so all I could tell was that is was some sort of routing command. “What is it?”
    “It’s a hardware-level autofunction,” said Cerice, “and it grabbed Shara.”
    “Hardware-level? Are you sure?” That could get really ugly really fast.
    While the mweb is administered by the Fates through their individual webtroll servers, I’d learned recently that the actual core architecture is a cluster of multiprocessor quantum mainframes that come preassembled from Necessity herself. When a replacement unit is needed, it’s delivered by the Furies, who are the only goddesses allowed to interact with Necessity directly. More than that, nobody knows.
    That’s because no one messes with Necessity. Repeat, no one . Not my grandmother or her sisters, not Zeus, not Hades, not even Eris—and Discord’s flat-out nuts, a friend, but nuts all the same. Necessity is to the gods what Fate is to everybody else.
    So if Shara’s trip had been interrupted at the hardware level, it was because of something Necessity had personally built into the system. The very thought made my bones itch.
    “Can you find out where she is?” I asked, trying not to get my hopes