Codespell by Kelly McCullough Page B

line she’d connected to. It looked rather like a maintenance area in a mall, all gray walls and rough concrete unsmoothed by the passage of data. I turned trafficward and began to move on my own. I also turned right and up and diagonally, but true direction is essentially meaningless in the virtual world of the mweb. It’s all about information flow, and what I was really doing was heading to the closest nexus. When I got there, I followed the traffic once again.

    After a few more twists and turns, I reached the heavily used areas of the mweb. Here, the smooth shiny walls of the tunnel were farther apart, but the packets came and went like clouds of swarming bees. I had the urge to keep my mouth shut so I wouldn’t inhale any of them. Since I wasn’t actually breathing or wearing a physical body, this was perhaps a bit silly, but the habits of a lifetime in the flesh are hard to discard. Especially since I was so much bigger than most of the chunks of information that moved around me.

    The soul is irreducible. Unlike most of the data that flows through the mweb, it cannot be broken into a bunch of smaller segments and sent from point A to point B via multiple paths. This posed an immediate problem when I arrived at my destination, the last nexus before the mweb server farm—how to bypass the packet-size security filters.

    It was not an unexpected problem, nor one I hadn’t overcome in the past. Every protected node on the mweb has some variation on this particular security feature. But it had been a while. I wanted to take my time and look at things from up close before I made any final decisions about approach.

    I was immediately glad that I’d decided not to rush in, as things had changed significantly since my last visit. The servers themselves were physically located within and administered from the Temple of Fate and always had been, but previously they’d had their own security systems separate from Fate’s. That was no longer the case. Where once there had been multiple portals, there now stood a seamless firewall, its first layer like a wall of backlit blue silk. It was stamped with the usual dire warnings about the ultimate destruction of trespassers.

    “I don’t like the looks of that,” said Melchior, peering out of my jacket pocket.

    “I’m not thrilled either. What do you suppose is behind it?” I asked.

    “A real estate grab on Fate’s part?”

    I nodded. The mweb’s highest-traffic function might be to allow the Fates to run the operation of destiny across all the infinite realms of probability, but it was also the central transportation and communication network for the entire pantheon. Because of that and—implicitly—as an assertion of Necessity’s ultimate control over the system, it had been kept as open source and open access as possible.

    Putting the mweb’s controls completely within the domain of Fate might simply have been a temporary measure designed to secure the system in light of Necessity’s current troubles. I’m sure that was exactly how the Fates were selling things—they’re the ultimate mistresses of spin, putting even Arachne to shame. But even if it wasn’t yet the power play Melchior suspected, it would become so before too long. The Fates would not willingly relinquish power they had once gained.

    “What’s next?” asked Melchior. “Do we get to go home and think it over for a while? Maybe plot out a careful plan of attack to be implemented at a later date? Or do we just rush in where angels fear to tread?”

    “Three guesses, Mel, and none of ’em have wings.”

    “Why did I know you were going to say that?” He sighed. “This whole Raven as trickster thing reinforces the worst aspects of your personality. You know that, don’t you?”

    I didn’t bother to answer, just slipped in closer to the glowing azure fabric of the firewall. It was layered like a dance of seven veils costume, with each veil a filter. The ones I could see in the