Spirits in the Wires by Charles De Lint Page A

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    He stretched his arms over his head, then got up and went into the kitchen, returning with a can of soda and a bag of chips. He doubted that anything was going to happen immediately. If the Webmaster at the Word-wood was anything like every other Webmaster Jackson knew, he’d be so overworked that he probably wouldn’t get to the e-mail for a few days. And then he’d have to actually update the site before the virus could even start to do its thing.
    He had a sip of his soda to wash down a mouthful of chips.
    This really was an amazing site. The video and audio of the background alone were enough to mesmerize him. No matter how long he studied it, he couldn’t detect a loop in either. Then there was the swiftness of response time to messages and the sheer volume of material on the site itself.
    He did another check for code, but there was still none available to view.
    Whoever had done this really knew his stuff. How did you make code invisible, but still readable to the viewer’s browser?
    Magic.
    Voodoo.
    His mouth went dry, and not because of the chips. He had another sip of his soda, remembering what he’d been telling Aaran.
    He wasn’t entirely ready to believe that the Internet was spawning A.I.s somewhere out there in its pixelated reaches, but there was no denying that there were some brilliant programmers. If the Webmaster of the Wordwood was as good as he appeared to be, he might just detect the virus before it ever did any damage. Worse, he might be able to track it back to this computer.
    You didn’t need magic for that. You just needed good hacking skills.
    And maybe, once the Webmaster had Jackson’s I.D., he might want to deliver some payback. Do a little walkabout through, oh say, Jackson’s bank accounts and set all the balances to zero.
    Jackson stared at his monitor and began to regret sending the virus. He hadn’t wanted to do it in the first place—who got pleasure out of trashing somebody’s hard work except for emotional misers like Aaran Goldstein? There was something creepy about this whole business. The site. Aaran’s need for revenge. The blackmail.
    The forest on his screen was starting to give him the willies just the way a real-world forest did. The few times he’d been out in the country in the past few years, he’d always gotten the feeling that something was hidden in among the trees, watching him.
    It hadn’t been like that when he was a kid. As a kid, he used to spend all his spare time in the wood lots behind the housing development where he’d grown up. At least he had until a bunch of kids had taken to lying in wait for him, chasing him through the trees and beating him up whenever they could. That was when he’d first started to spend so much time in front of a computer.
    Maybe that was why forests still creeped him out. Why he always felt like he was being watched. Logically, he knew it wasn’t true anymore. Just like there was nothing hidden in the branches and leaves of the Wordwood’s index page, watching him now.
    But it
felt
like there was.
    He started to reach for his mouse to click himself off-line, when his screen flickered and went blank. A moment later, a familiar message appeared along the left side of his browser window:
    This page cannot be displayed.
    The page you are looking for is currently unavailable. The Website might be experiencing technical difficulties, or you may need to adjust your browser settings …
    Followed by a list of the things he could try to reconnect with the site. Yadda, yadda, yadda.
    He watched, unable to move, expecting he didn’t know what. But finally, he reached forward again and disconnected his computer from the Internet.
    What do you know. His virus had worked. And quickly, too.
    He didn’t feel any sense of accomplishment—not like when he’d finally gotten past the bank’s firewalls and realized he was actually in. He just felt