In Search of the Lost Kaicl (2)
Ortes appeared out of nowhere and made an outrageous request.
Arabelle did not reach for some stock reply like What did you say? She had a more formal rebuttal prepared instead.
"We hacked the Phytoes factory several times already, back during the Artificial Decalogue mess. But the only data in that factory is the automatons' basic operating system. Nothing else worth mentioning."
"That is precisely what matters. The automaton operating system is still being updated on a regular basis, is it not?"
Arabelle searched the records in her auxiliary brain and nodded. The automatons of the Phytoes Magic Tower were, in fact, receiving steady updates.
"But that's only the tower's artificial spirit doing the work mechanically. There is no secret message from Kaicl hidden in there."
Ortes merely shrugged and smiled. She could feel it plainly: he had no intention of yielding.
Someday, just once, she wanted to see that endlessly smiling face properly crumpled. Swallowing the urge, Arabelle set to work.
Aether Space. A world on the other side, formed where the lingering echoes of magic had piled upon one another. A half-real place, stranded somewhere between the real and the unreal.
Ordinary mages sank into meditation and entered Aether Space through a spirit body. A few who were anything but ordinary linked brain and Aether Space directly.
Arabelle was one of those few.
A direct connection between flesh and Aether Space granted far freer command of mana than entry through a spirit body, but it raised the threat of death in equal measure. When people spoke of mages whose brains had burned out while hacking an enemy tower, they were usually describing the end of someone who had attempted this kind of direct link.
If a firewall was as advanced as those of the Ten Towers, it could reach through the spirit body and destroy the flesh waiting in reality. Fortunately, the firewall of the Phytoes Magic Tower was not on that level.
In Aether Space, Arabelle was a queen spider in full. Spider drones fashioned from her own flesh slipped into the tower's physical servers and helped force the intrusion.
The moment four spider drones injected aether-virus venom into the servers in reality, the Phytoes Magic Tower's servers activated their antivirus. That instant was exactly what Arabelle had been waiting for.
Inside Aether Space, the antivirus took shape as a wolf wreathed in flame, while the virus her drones had injected appeared as a swarm of tens of thousands of spiders. The flame-wolf poured fire from its entire body and burned the spiders away. In the moment the antivirus locked all of its resources on incinerating the virus, the web Arabelle cast snared the data stored in Aether Space.
She read it, copied it, and set it back in place. The antivirus needed roughly fifteen seconds to burn every last trace of the virus. In the days when the Lernaean Magic Tower had worked her like a tool, Arabelle had staked her life on a jump-rope routine timed to fractions of a second. Fifteen seconds was time to spare.
What do I do. I'm getting nervous.
Every word from Arabelle, fused with the Hyper Mechanic Spider, shook the guess I had made.
Then again, there was no way other people could fail to think of something I had cooked up in five minutes after hearing Bertrand out. If it turned out my whole theory was completely wrong, there would be nothing left for me to do.
Ah. There was one thing.
Run to Carisia and beg her to find him for me. I did not even want to think about cleaning up afterward, but that still beat failing outright.
While I was weighing which style of full prostration would earn me more of Carisia's pity, Arabelle opened the eyes she had kept shut, as if the job were finished.
"That was much faster than I expected."
"The Phytoes Magic Tower has no mage directly controlling the firewall right now. Call it the limit of an unmanned tower."
Arabelle shrugged and snapped her fingers. The cables linked to her spine came away one by one.
"Even so, don't get any ideas about seizing the Phytoes Magic Tower itself by hacking. To do that, you would have to hack the tower core."
"Hacking a tower core bound to the Decalogue's radiance is suicide. I am well aware."
I am not someone like Carisia. I only assign work a person can actually bear. Whether or not Arabelle noticed the wounded look in my eyes, she went on indifferently uncoupling the external computation rig.
Stepping down from the steel spider, she tossed a USB drive my way.
"Catch. Strip out things like the unmanned factory's machine-control programs, and that's all there is."
Reading information extracted from Aether Space is a simple matter for any mage above a certain level.
For mages. I, of course, am not a mage.
Between Magic Inscribed Drives and a handful of other tricks, I am not limited to physical attacks, but moments like this still sting.
"Might I borrow a viewing tool? My office still isn't sorted out."
"...Cautious of you. Of course."
Why the compliment all of a sudden? It doesn't sound like she's mocking me for being unable to use magic.
Arabelle could only shake her head at Ortes's paranoid sense of security. Did he think she might have planted malware on the Magic Inscribed Drive she had just handed over?
It was a choice made with spyware in mind—the kind that could install itself if the data were opened on the tower's internal systems. He had only recently bent her beneath the name of Hydra Inc. Of course he did not trust her.
Even so, it rankled.
She had never once considered injecting malicious code. From the day Ortes warned her, betrayal had not even been among her options. She disliked that endlessly smiling face. She found the boss frightening. Petty complaints, yes—but those were those, and this was this.
Her body, rebuilt by the Lernaean Magic Tower into a prosthetic meant only for Aether Space, was inefficient. Even with her mana fully buffered, six hours of work outside and she needed a replacement power source. Carisia could cut the mana supplied to the district where the Information Guild was based, and Ortes already knew what she was. Arabelle could not afford to cross either of them.
The goal of becoming a new king does seem a little too grandiose, but...
With a practiced ease, Ortes loaded the compressed aether data from the Magic Inscribed Drive onto a hologram projector, and Arabelle watched him.
Most mages preferred not to use an external tool like that. They would plug straight into a port wired to the nervous system and read the data themselves. It was faster, simpler, and let them take in a great deal of information at once. As for warding off malicious data, any mage capable of attempting such a thing had at least some measure of defense.
And yet here was a man perfectly at home handling aether data through an outside device. Several hypotheses rose in Arabelle's mind.
One: he feared being struck by truly vicious malware.
Two: making backup copies had become a habit.
Three: he was not a mage.
The first and the second amounted to little more than an occupational hazard carried to its logical end. Mages who handled information intensively were bound, at least once, to see a corpse whose brain had been eaten by malicious code—someone who had tried to breathe through the skin and died of it. On the milder end, days of memory vanished before and after a piece of code was read. Anyone with that kind of experience would inevitably seek out an external device, if only to read information more safely.
The third possibility...
Arabelle frowned. Honestly, it was the least likely.
Even so, keeping every possibility in mind was the professional instinct of someone who dealt in information.
Come to think of it, I have never once seen him cast anything that actually looked like magic.
He did land lethal blows by deploying basic spells through a Magic Inscribed Drive with perfect timing. But that way of fighting was closer to a warrior's methods, or an assassin's, than a mage's.
Huh?
Maybe he really was not a mage. She had dug through every record of the days when Carisia and Ortes swept Etna City's underworld, and not once was there an account of Ortes using powerful magic.
Working carefully through the hypothesis, Arabelle remembered the last problem.
That faint presence of his. That, at least, could not be explained unless magic was involved.
If it were an artifact imbued with that kind of magic, it wouldn't be impossible...
And if not magic, what other power was there that could still work miracles?
"Director?"
It was Ortes's voice that pulled Arabelle out of the riddle.
"Did something go wrong while the data was decompressing? I built it so it should not hit a processing limit under any ordinary load."
"No. Among the default install files for each automaton model, what are these? They look completely useless."
Arabelle, who had been reading the code of the data projected as a hologram, slowly shook her head.
"Exactly what they look like. Useless dummy data. It's preinstalled for operating-system rollbacks and updates, and under normal conditions it doesn't do anything at all."
"I see."
Ortes began extracting only that dummy data. Watching his hands move busily, Arabelle studied the situation with care, then asked a question.
"You aren't certain?"
"Director, what are you saying all of a sudden?"
"In the meeting you said it so confidently—that Kaicl was beneath the volcano. But right now you're moving as carefully as someone who doesn't know a thing."
The question was meant to sound out the true nature of Ortes's information. Last time, and again this time, he insisted on verifying what he already had one more time than necessary.
That was the behavior of someone who could not trust his source. Depending on the answer, she might narrow the list of groups from which Ortes obtained his information.
"I am ninety-nine percent certain."
Ortes answered simply, without a moment's hesitation.
Then every one of my guesses falls apart?
"If the information is that solid, there's no reason to obsess over cross-checking it this far, is there?"
A line poised delicately on the border between question, provocation, and interrogation. Ortes's expression stayed perfectly calm.
"Ordinarily, I would agree with you."
"This is the President's business. If it is not one hundred percent, I cannot accept it."
What is he even saying now. Has he never actually been torn apart by Carisia?