Free Cybermancy by Kelly McCullough

back around her neck. I might have had the more strenuous day, but she’d been running on sheer will for weeks. Now that she’d finally let herself collapse, I didn’t expect her to move before noon.
    A selfish part of me wanted to get her up, to drag her out in a pell-mell effort to deny my danger. But she really needed the sleep, and I knew deep down that waking her would only serve to drive the awareness of impending doom deeper. Instead, I pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and slipped out to the kitchen with the intention of making myself some coffee and breakfast. Melchior was there before me, handing me a cup as I staggered through the arch that led into the hallway.
    “Eggs?” he asked.
    “Depends, are you cooking them?” Melchior and food preparation made for a bad mix.
    “Great Zeus, no!” said Melchior. “I’m going to run down to the hotel on the corner and pick them up from their café like I did the coffee.”
    “That would explain the Murray’s Hall logo on the mug, then.” It was a very high-class establishment where Harvard put up visiting VIPs and rich alums. The food was outstanding, and I could avoid any guilt by leaving them the money for breakfast in my will. “Sounds good, Mel. What am I getting?”
    “Normally, I’d say ‘whatever’s under the heat lamps when I get there,’ but they just put in a new computerized ordering system, so the sky’s the limit.”
    Hacked breakfast and a menu, what more could you ask for? I told Melchior what I wanted, and fifteen minutes later he delivered a set of covered hotel dishes containing a bacon-and-mushroom omelet, crispy hash browns, homemade English muffins, a couple of dark chocolate croissants, a ham steak, fresh-squeezed orange juice, and more coffee. I picked up a place mat and wafted a breakfast-flavored breeze down the hallway. When even this enticement didn’t generate a sound from Cerice’s direction, I tucked in. I’d have to ask Melchior to steal another breakfast when she finally woke up.
    Once I’d finished transferring calories from my plate to my stomach and gotten up a good head of caffeine, I asked Melchior to go back to laptop and called up a Graphic User Interface version of the e-mail transfer point Cerice had found. Maybe GUI would show me things that hadn’t been apparent in binary.
    Collecting a tiny dagger from a sheath in the sleeve of my leather jacket, I plugged a networking cable into the hilt and connected the other end to Mel’s laptop form. The athame was maybe five inches long and narrow enough to pass for a letter opener, but no letter opener had ever been this sharp. I braced my wrist against the edge of the table, then plunged the blade into my left palm, bearing down until the guard touched my flesh and the tip stood out from the back of my hand. Bitter agony catapulted me out of my flesh and into the world of the mweb, where it left me.
    I hung above a sort of crystalline city, the mweb server in all its multicore interconnected glory. I’d had Melchior color the native software in a pale translucent green, remote client apps in a deeper opaque olive, and the internal pathways between programs sea blue. Backbone lines into and out of the server were orange, lesser links yellow. The honking-big pipeline that went directly to the Fate Core I marked in do-not-touch radioactive red. I’d already dodged one death sentence for interfering with it; no sense giving the Furies extra incentive.
    Melchior tightened focus on the place where Shara had gone elsewhere. It felt like a slow-motion skydive as I went from a satellite’s-eye city view through neighborhood mode down to looking at a single building. The e-mail routing node was a cube about the size of a six-story office building and part of a big cluster of similar nodes, mostly much larger ones. It also stood out like a cyclops in an optometrist’s shop. Instead of the greens we’d used for software nodes, it was literally a black box, an enigma