The Floating Spirit 21 April 2003

Installment for 21 April 2003

The back of Nelle's head itched. The inside - under the patch of skin Murasaki shaved, under the bone, under the fluid sack that protected her wetware.
"I don't like this, Murasaki."
He said nothing. She heard him, clicking away at his antique keyboard.
Vision came on. Nelle looked at the Baroness - long elegant dress of black spider silk. She wore her concrete blonde hair short in the back, almost a crew cut. Her features weren't highly rendered. They looked off-the-shelf.
"I don't like this, Murasaki," she said again. "He can hear me."
"Talk to me," Nelle said.
The Baroness looked her up and down.
"Really?" she asked. "Talk to you? Some legacy cowboy? Or cowgirl? How does that work?"
"Cowboy. Cowgirls sleep with us after we come in from the range. I usually take boys for cowgirls."
The Baroness looked down at Nelle's body, up to her face, back at her tits, back at her face. "Swell."
"I'm not - " Nelle stopped and swallowed. "I'm not here for you to - "
"You're here because of Murasaki."
The Baroness turned and walked away from Nelle, toward the bookcase next to the window. Nelle felt the itch grow stronger as she watched the silk dress. Ancient sight organs - evolved in her monkey ancestors - protested at being force-fed images.
"Your dress is nicely rendered," Nelle said.
"Thank you," the Baroness answered, not looking back at Nelle. "I commissioned the original from a house in Lyon on the condition that they never again make any dress to its cut. I paid a ransom for Meta-Cyndi's measurements and even had her come in for a fitting. My simularc wore it to the Oscars three years ago. I had the generated version scanned from that so as to include each real strand wrapping of eight strands of silk. It moves indistinguishably from the original, which I'm done with, if you want to try it on."
"Yeah, I'm fat, you're not. I get it."
The Baroness smiled. She turned back to Nelle.
"As long as we have that straight," she told Nelle. "Now. Murasaki. The Floating Spirit? Still?"
"In part. One of the Barons is trying to kill us. At least trying to kill Murasaki. I guess I'm just in the way."
"How could you not be?" the Baroness said, spreading her hands in front of her. Nelle crossed her arms and then forced herself to uncross them.
"Again, I get it, but this Baron is not killing random fat chicks, just fat chicks he thinks are me."
"Do you - or Murasaki - expect me to help you against a fellow Baron?"
"Why not?" Nelle asked. "There - ow - there - "
"Did you stub your toe?" the Baroness asked.
"Not used to this brand of link. My brain doesn't like this."
The Baroness shook her head. "Your brain cannot feel pain, cowboy. She's just unhappy with you. Now, what were you saying?"
"Why not help us? There are only so many Grid nodes. What's bad for him could be good for you."
"I already own two," the Baroness said, running her fingers over the spider silk, making Nelle's brain pucker up and quiver. "They take all my time. I haven't even been in my body in two weeks."
"If he gets the Floating Spirit - "
The Baroness laughed. "Has Murasaki convinced you of that nonsense? An ancient god reincarnated in a twentieth computer program?" she snapped her fingers and music started.
Slow, jazzy, deep rhythms. She raised her raised her arms and started to sway and dance toward Nelle.
"You're being childish," Nelle said, closing her eyes to minimize connection with the black silk.
"I'm not chasing legends," The Baroness said.
Nelle pushed down inside her mind - the same push she practiced and used a thousand times. She opened her eyes.
"Looks like you're back, cowboy."
"Yippee kay ey, Baroness."
The Baroness danced her way slowly around Nelle. "Murasaki so charmed me. He spent months making contact, convincing me to talk to him about his old gods. You'd think that someone as rich and powerful as me would be above the flattery of mere attention."
"Murasaki is single minded, but I know that the program is real. It's Murasaki who thinks that it - "
"That it found ancient powers, yes."
The Baroness stopped dancing and stood right in front of Nelle, waiting a moment. Nelle meant to speak, but the Baroness seemed to be searching for something.
"Ancient powers," the Baroness said. "A program, in a regular Grid encapsulation, is betraying abnormal behavior. Do you know what we do in a circumstance like that? We scoop out the original code and reimplement the interface. Don't you do that for a living?"
"No," Nelle said. "I rewrite the code inside the encapsulation or I write a shim between the encapsulation and new code - usually Java#."
"That's right. You work Big Iron. Fortran, COBOL, pascal. Even saying the words sound naughty nowadays."
"Get a better fetish, Baroness."
"So, why are you fat?"
"Baroness."
"I'm not being childish this time. What do you weigh? 350 libras? You certainly don't have to weigh that. Hire a trainer to take your body out for two hours a day. Buy a hunger implant. This isn't the twentieth century."
"Baroness, the Baron is trying to kill us. He believes the Floating Spirit is real - and useful. Don't you think you should keep him from it?"
"I suppose. I suppose. Murasaki thinks that something happened to it, out there, in the cybether. Is that what you think?"
"I - " Nelle swallowed. "The Floating Spirit was never encapsulated, not by itself. Along with a lot of left over data from the Internet days, it was put into a generalized encapsulation to be reviewed and then stored."
She heard Murasaki get up and walk over to her.
"This is new," the Baroness told her. "Why didn't Murasaki-san tell me this?"
"I found out myself after the Baron tried to kill us for the second time. The analyzer couldn't put it away because they never finished analyzing it. It kept coming up with new behavior."
The Baroness nodded. "Interesting. So, it might actually be sentient. The Floating Spirit and whatever other data fell into that encapsulation."
Nelle shook her head. "The other data is gone. The Floating Spirit emptied it out and grew to the limits of the encapsulation."
"Nelle, why didn't you tell me this?" Murasaki whispered. Nelle ignored him.
"Well, Mister Murasaki, isn't this interesting?"
"What if the Floating Spirit gets out and runs wild? What if it takes over the Grid and we have to shut it down and start over? How often will you see your body after that?"
"There's something else I haven't told you about my silk dress," the Baroness said, turning to walk three paces from Nelle. The music changed to a hard back beat and the Baroness strode to it, like a runway model. She turned around showed the dress, turned again. Nelle's brain quivered and shook under the weight of all the extra input. "You can make spider silk artificially, but this dress is from real spiders. I own a colony of them. You can't raise spiders like silkworms - they kill each other and make the wrong kind of silk. So, we have implants in their heads that run their tiny brains and make whatever kind of silk we want. Of course, we breed them for new spiders - they're all used up after a few weeks. The little silkboys get their little silkgirls and then die. Can I make my point any more obvious? Good bye."
The Baroness disappeared.
The dress - fully rendered - fell to the floor.

"Why didn't you tell me?" Murasaki asked. "Why did you tell her?"
"I found out from Captain Coyote," Nelle said. "I need to masturbate."
Murasaki paced back and forth, stopped, turned and stalked away to his end of the container.
Nelle slipped her hand down to the hem of her skirt and pulled it up. She pulled the base of her thumb up -
"How could you?" Murasaki demanded, stomping the eight paces from his bed pad. "I spent five years trying to figure out who put the Floating Spirit in an encapsulation and why and you hid that from me."
"Hey, I'm not doing this for pleasure. That hurt. Talking to her hurt." Nelle realized she was shouting. She looked up at Murasaki, hand still up her dress.
He looked down at her, eyes squinted in anger. "How could you hide this from me?" he asked quietly. "The Floating Spirit is my life's work."
"I lost my life when you came to Spokane. I'll never have it back as long as the Grid Baron is alive. If you're all mad at me, I'll go and you can find another cowboy."
"I didn't mean for the Baron to attack you," Murasaki said. "Nothing like that. Once we find the Floating Spirit, there won't be any danger we can't handle. I want you to promise me you won't hide anything else you find. Or else go," he told her, his hand flailing.
"I agree," Nelle told him. "Now, will you excuse me?"

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