Cyberwitch Academy: Learn or Burn

Chapter 42

"This is the library of your dreams", whispers the librarian, and she's right. It seems to stretch on forever, limitless and baroque, labyrinthine.

And she goes on to inform us that it touches every collection of books ever written, and if you seek long enough in the stacks you will find all the books that people did not write because they were slaves, or workers, or women and they were denied the opportunity.

"Every book that a child born into poverty could have written but did not is also here."

And I find that a bold claim, but these AIs are half mad at the best of times.

And then Vash and Ty start running their distributed dump of distraction attack. Ty appears and requests the ISBN of an obscure title, then she appears again, and Vash does the same and pretty soon there are tens of thousands of them making request after request for obscure books that may possibly exist but most probably don't.

Clever stupid. Stupid clever. The AI can do many superhuman things, but nobody told her that there shouldn't be a thousand different versions of the same person talking to her at once.

She packs some obscene processing power, but it reaches a limit after a while, and I realise she is no longer aware of me at all, so I make my move, following a series of turns and twists through the stacks, from a sketched out set of instructions supplied to me by one of Alice's associates.

Alice and I haven't managed to meet in the real world yet.

And then I find it, the terrifying locked door, ornate and strange, out of step with the rest of the library, and I place my hand on it and read the inscriptions warning that any witch who enters here without permission shall die and that her death shall be on all planes of existence and she will be scrubbed from all rememberings, and 'if you thought a family full of spiders had no killers in it then you were sore mistaken child.'

And I begin to feel the words coming up in me, the words my mother used to sing, and I know that she made this lock, this cryptography wrapped up in so many layers of representation, just her style, it's a code that sounds like a poem, or a poem that serves the function of code, but it's the feeling too, without the right feeling in the delivery it does not connect.

I try to whisper the string of sounds. I'm casting an unlocking spell, I guess. Feel silly and powerful all at once.

I can sense shivers crowding around me, called by the incantation, they're always looking for a host, and then the door opens and the shivers flee, disappearing away from me back into the corners of the systems in which they hide. Something scared them away. Like they know what is in the locked chamber.

And I'm left alone as I pass through the door, wondering if this will be my last day alive.

Inside I find myself in a long corridor of a dungeon, and all the cells contain things from nightmares, and they screech at me so loudly I have to slam the door shut behind me and hope that the distraction routine is still working, not long before the secret school's defences will notice a DDOS attack, it's such a basic move I'm surprised it worked at all.

And then I have time to adjust, tell my pounding heart to be still, these creatures are not real, and in any case, they are bound in bars of black ice, code that stops them from getting to me.

And then I can study them more closely and see what they are. Some I recognise, some I don't, it's a collection of horrors from old stories. monsters from mythologies around the world. I see some From Mexican folklore. I see some of those made famous by fantasy novels. Some of those that we may have seen in an old English literature class, like a wendigo or whatever.

And they're smaller, kind of self-contained versions, but each one is trying to attack me futilely through its cage. And I walk a long time down this menagerie of horrors, trying to think about how exactly my mom, the one that I knew, connected with all this.

And at the end of the hall there is a laboratory, like something from a mad scientist's book, but also kind of functional, with some real stuff, gear I recognise from 'take your daughter to work days' back when mom worked in a lab doing cognitive science research. Before she got into augmented intelligence.

And Then I notice something cute. It's a fluffy little imp. And it flies over to me and nuzzles at my hand, sort of purring, then it speaks.

"Ursula! How nice of you to come. I am panhandle, your mother's lab assistant."

And I choke up a little at the mention of mom. I feel excited and scared all at once.

"Oh my god! You can tell me about mom?"

"Of course, Ursula! But I only knew her when she was here, at work. I do not know why she has not come back to work for so long. Has it been a year now?"

"Yes. Just over a year and two months since she disappeared."

Panhandle looks at me sympathetically and strokes my cheek with his tiny hand. The tears come freely. Goddamit. Focus Ursula.

"She was on a work trip in London. We think maybe she was arrested, because of her work. But I didn't know anything about her work really."

"She was trying to make the Rhizome into a technology to help traumatised young women. That's why she toured so often, going to schools around the world, looking for young people, mostly girls, who had suffered early childhood trauma. Plenty of those in London after the civil war."

And it all fell into place.

She had mentioned things like that, but I never really listened.

Why a biotech and AI researcher would spend so much time going into schools, and why she kept going to London where the civil war and the collapse of the economy had left so many young people with trauma.

It all began to become clear.

"But you need to know about Marketta don't you."

"What? No, I want to find mom."

"Well, you can't find your mother because Marketta is going to hurt you. Like she most likely did to your mother."

"How do you know about Marketta if you are stuck in this lab?"

"Because Marketta came here a few times when she was still friends with your mother. Do you have any idea where mum might be? No, but Marketta does. And you need to find a way to get to her my child."

My head is reeling. Mom and Marketta were friends?

Then I get a message from Ty, "the attack is failing. The librarian will soon come patrolling the stacks."

"Oh, so tell me then, what do I need to know?"

"Marketta is like you. She has the hyper-rhizome. She is a cyberWitch. She is insane. She wants to burn down the whole world. And she is using the witch hunt as a pawn in her game. She wants to drive you mad, turn you into a great weapon. All of it, everything she is doing, is directed at you. We have run out of time now child; the librarians are coming."

And I turn and sprint back toward the door, the monsters howling and waling at me as I run, and I swear one of them almost seems to be crying out the words 'It lies!'. And I dive out the door into Ty's arms as Vash slams it behind me and we scurry away into the stacks while the librarian strides past with her oil lamp.

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