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life. Each was attached to a spinner. But no one was seated before them.
"I did not turn those on." Ooljee was staring stupidly at the processing
images.
Moody was no longer tired, no longer bored. "I think we'd better find a way to
shut this thing down. Fast." As he finished, another pair of screens high up
on a wall became active. Ooljee grimly worked his spinner, the ratpad, and
nearby input keys, until he was literally stabbing at mem.
"No good. No damn good. Y adil,"
"I can see that." Moody was trying to make some sense, any kind of sense, out
of the millions of images and figures that were avalanching across the
multiple screens.
"It's still resolving and still expanding.'' Ooljee was just sitting now, his
gaze flicking in dumbfounded amazement from one monitor to the next. "And
whatever it is doing is
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127
affecting the hardware. We are getting active response as well as analysis.
What is that damn sandpainting a template for?" He gestured at the no longer
quite so innocent-appearing fax of the
Kettrick painting where it lay on the console next to his Scorpion. "If this
is some kind of virus, we may be causing a lot of damage."
"C'mon, man," said Moody. "From what the Laughters told us, that design is at
least a couple of hundred years old. They didn't have computers then, or
viruses to affect them, much less mollysphere storage."
Ooljee was rising. "I am going to have to ask the building engineer to cut the
power. For all I
know, we are already on course to crash every opdisk and molly in the
department." He eyed the detective resignedly. "You had no part in this. I
will bear the consequences. It is now unavoidable that there will be
consequences. And all I thought to do was to play a few picture games with the
painting."
The lights went out, flickering once before silently expiring. Not the
screens. Every monitor glowed with diagrams or numbers as the mutating program
continued to build upon itself, utilizing more and more of the station's
mollystorage. A wall phone began to jangle insistently. Without taking his
eyes from the first monitor he'd activated, Ooljee lifted the receiver. The
voice on the other end was loud and frantic enough for Moody to make out some
of* the words.
"Who's down there? Everything's going nuts upstairs! Who are you people?
What's your authorization? I demand to know your !"
The sergeant calmly replaced the receiver on its hook, effectively silencing
the unidentified interrogator. "Someone is very upset. I think we should try
to think of an explanation."
"How're y'all gonna do that when you don't even know
138
Hlan Dean Foster what's happening?" Moody spoke without looking at his
colleague. He could not help but ignore him in favor of the dazzling displays
that now filled every corner of the room.
Every screen, every telltale, every readout and monitor, was alive and
glowing, bombarding them with information they could make no sense of, and
chromatic schematics as bright and ever-changing as an exhibition of kinetic
art. All that was missing was deafening popular music, Moody thought,
preferably by a group like Molten Scalpel or the Raucoids, and they could sell
admission.
In place of music there Was a persistent, electronic hum that rose and fell in
a pattern that, while not recognizable, was self-evidently anything but
random. An eerie, fuzzy whisper that tittered in the background, emanating
from an unidentified source like rats running the conduits.
Ooljee disconnected his spinner. It had no effect whatsoever on the now
self-sustaining program.
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Both men began backwalking toward the door. Moody's imagination was beginning
to run away with him. While whatever was happening here might not be easily or
readily explained, he reminded himself, it wasn't an excerpt from a horrorvid
either. Ooljee's fiddling with a Mandlebrot Set derived from the Kettrick
sandpainting had inexplicably generated some kind of reproduction program
within the police molly sphere. That was physics, not phantasy.
Still, he was measurably relieved when the door did not resist Ooljee's touch.
Behind them the room was filled with a booming wku-whu-whu sound, a
deep-throated electronic pounding. It was interrupted frequently by the first
sharp cracklings and snapping noises of overloaded circuits.
Above it all echoed the plaintive wail of the wall phone.
Suddenly Ooljee pointed to the original monitor. While the rest of the screens
were awash in incomprehen-
file:///F|/rah/Alan%20Dean%20Foster/Foster,%20Alan%20Dean%20-%20Cyber%20Way.tx
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sible psychedelic babble, it had turned a calm cool green, a verdant field on
which throbbed a single flickering word:
WORKING
Working, Moody mused wonderingly. Working at what?
He would not be spooked. There was a reasonable explanation for whatever was
happening. As soon as they could shut everything down, recovery specialists
would run a trawl on the mollysphere web and figure out exactly what had
occurred.
The whu-wku-whu sound in the room was now accompanied by a faint rush of air
that sounded like hahowa hahowa. It was a most peculiar electronic
counterpoint.
Ooljee thought so too. "You hear that?" The detective nodded. "That is really
strange."
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