WebMage Read Free

implemented," he said.
    With those simple words, the nastiest virus I had yet coded was released into the mweb. If it worked, it would scramble the routers for my whole node band and put my great-aunt's webhounds smack in the middle of a data storm. There was no way they'd be able to track me through that. There was even a chance of completely fragging them.
    "Uh, Boss," said Melchior.
    "Yes. What is it, Mel."
    "I just lost contact with the carrier wave."
    "I thought you couldn't get in."
    "I couldn't, but that's not what I meant. I mean it just cut out completely."
    "It can't do that, unless…" I trailed off as a really ugly thought occurred to me. I looked at Melchior, and he nodded.
    "There's no carrier wave and no mweb line," he said. "I can't even get a ping off the backbone. I think we just took the entire net down, Boss."
    "Sweet Necessity," I murmured. "What have I done now?"
    * * * *
    Sitting at the desk in my dorm, I cradled my head in my hands. Melchior sat on the floor nearby. For four hours we'd been trying to establish some kind of link to the mweb. Nothing worked. There was very little doubt that we'd crashed the whole damn thing. If this was ever traced back to me, I'd have more to worry about than Atropos.
    "Well, Mel, I think it's time we admitted—" He held a hand up.
    He cocked his long, pointed ears this way and that for a few moments, then got up and walked to the network jack in the wall. Looking confused, he wetted a fingertip and stuck it into the socket. A moment later he let out a prolonged modulated whistle.
    "Uh, Boss. I don't know that you're going to believe this, but you've got new mail."
    "Over the local net?"
    "Yes, indeedy."
    "What is it?"
    "It's from Cerice. She wants a visual ASAP."
    "Over the local line? That's going to lock a lot of folks out of their online services. Where is she mailing from?"
    "[email protected] via AOL.com."
    "Well, so much for AOL for the next twenty minutes or so. I wonder what she's doing in this DecLocus."
    Cerice is even further down Clotho's bloodline than I am Lachesis's, making us something like forty-seventh cousins and barely related, but we're of an age and have been friends since our teens. No one seems to know quite how long the children of Fate might live, but none of the family has yet to die of old age or even to look as though they someday might. If it weren't for a very low birth rate and an actuary's nightmare of violent death—mostly accidental but occasionally with intent—we'd be legion. As it is, there are certainly fewer than five hundred of us and, counting Cerice and me, no more than a dozen under the age of forty. Since I'd thought she was home in Clotho's domain working on a hardware-recycling project she'd been rather intense about of late, finding her here seemed almost too odd.
    "Melchior, Vlink; [email protected] via umn.edu to Cerice @shara.gob viaAOL.com. Execute."
    "Aye, aye. Searching for shara.gob." I used the brief pause that followed to drop the spell that altered my appearance. "Contact. Waiting for a response from shara.gob. Lock. Annexing extra bandwidth. Vtp linking initiated."
    Melchior opened his eyes and mouth wide. Three beams of light—green, blue, and red—shot forth from these orifices intersecting at a point several feet in front of his face. A translucent golden globe appeared at this juncture. It fogged, then filled with the three-dimensional image of a strikingly beautiful young woman. Her hair was so pale as to be almost white. Aside from that, her features bore a strong resemblance to my own, the primary difference being that on her they looked better. She was wearing some sort of formal court gown in a taffeta that seemed to shift from red to gold depending how the light hit it. It was very low cut, but a half jacket prevented it from being indecent.
    "Cerice, my darling," I said. "You're as ravishing as ever. It's an absolute pleasure to rest my weary eyes on your delightful features once again." Even