Read Cybermancy for Free Online

poor planning? With a sigh, he started making electronic blood-hound noises.
    I held my breath. Hades’ internal system is totally disconnected from the mweb—no way in, no way out—and I hadn’t been able to find out anything about it. That had been one of the factors that prevented me from getting here sooner. What if he was as much of a technophobe as Apollo? The chariot of the sun was still run on B.C. technology—Before Computers, that is. But a few moments after he started searching, Melchior tapped into hades.net .
    The system was like WiFi on speed, totally wireless and blazing fast but very short-range. There were dampers set up all around the perimeter of the underworld so no wardriving hacker on the outside could cop free access. Hades also believed in firewalls—the kind that came with brimstone—and security by sneaker-net.
    The sole connection from the mweb to the underworld was a hardwired link to the desktop machine in Hades’ office, and it had zero cross-connects to the intranet that ran the show down here. It also had weird access parameters that completely blocked outgoing locus transfers. That meant hacking and gating from the outside would only buy you a one-way ticket to invade Hades’ personal space, a bad idea of Iliadic proportions. Even if you managed to slide a little hack into his machine and gated in undetected, the only way to move a program on from there to where the preowned souls were processed was to have it loaded onto a disk and physically carried to one of the hades.net servers. Then, just as in my current situation, you had to get it back out. Very serious ugliness.
    Working from the inside, however, his intranet security was cake. It took Melchior about fifteen seconds to pop a hole into the command line, and from there we owned the soul-tracking software. I opened a terminal shell and ordered up a real-time lock on the current location of entry #99691046-Sh, better known as Shara. Once we had that, an in-system gate took care of getting us all together in the same meatspace. We found her sitting on a cliff edge overlooking the Lethe.
    “You don’t look so hot,” whispered Melchior, as we came up behind her.
    He was right. Shara, normally a bright lipstick purple in either of her shapes, had faded to a sort of lilac-tinted white. She barely even blinked at our arrival. I could have cried.
    “It’s kind of hard to maintain a tan down here, big boy,” she answered, pointing at the sunless, starless cavern roof above. “Land of twilight and all that.” Her webgoblin form and mannerisms had been modeled on the late, great Mae West, but they, too, seemed to have faded. The land of death was slowly converting her into a lost soul. “You’ll go the same way soon enough.”
    “Actually,” I said, “we weren’t planning on staying.”
    “Nobody ever does.” She looked sadly at Melchior. “He finally got you killed, huh? I always knew it would happen. At least he didn’t manage to do the same for Cerice.” A look of terrible pain crossed her face, all too similar to the ones I’d seen on Cerice when she thought I wasn’t looking. “I miss her so. Every time I think of her, I start wondering if I shouldn’t take a walk off the Lethe pier. I don’t want to forget her, but it hurts to remember.”
    “She sure hasn’t forgotten you,” I said. “That’s why we’re here, to get you out.”
    “Right.”
    “No, really,” said Melchior. “We’re not dead . . . at least not yet.”
    Shara looked dubious.
    “He’s telling the truth,” I said. “Look.” I unzipped my bag and pulled out a freezer-bagged bundle. Inside was the purple clamshell that normally housed Shara’s soul. I opened it wide and set it on the ground. The blank screen looked like a bottomless hole. “Hop in.”
    “You’re serious,” she said.
    “Yes, if you’ll pardon the expression, dead serious.”
    Shara reached out to touch the surface of her former self, then pulled back abruptly.