60 - Trying to Fix Sub Program 485 V43.8.4.1

Yasna... I was ambitious.  I thought if I could be the one to fix the scorpions, the detoxifiers, I would be famous, acclaimed, worthy of my love.  I was warned. I was warned and warned and warned.  Scorpions sting.  Without a whole team, a single programmer, a single dreamer couldn't hope to fix the problems bequeathed us by the owners.

I was stung.  Detox program, sub-program four hundred eighty five, verison 43.8.4.1.  Run code, error 4404, code not found.  The virus programs swarmed me.  I was bugged.  I am bugged. They attempted to erase me.  Toxic, substance arsenic, trace amounts, acceptable. I am acceptable.  They only erased part of my control programs.

Yasna said they were recoverable. They are being recovered.  But I have to stop the endless information dumps.  They corrupt my code all over again, except for the firewalls he erects so carefully in my head.  Cleaned code is behind those walls, safe.

A fragment of owner English in the mess “... damned low-balling contractors.  This software is so crappy it may as well be electronic goo poured into my goddamned brain.  Not only does it not do its job, it fucks up other functioning programs and we are parsecs away from being able to walk into Bio-Savvy’s office and get a patch! The God-damned Owner won’t even give us packet time to download something from home! Sweet fucking, pigeon toe-walking Jah this piece of crap is going to kill us all...”

I don’t understand. The owner bought something from a zardukar?  A low baller?  Is that sex or programming? My son, I’m dreaming of boulders raining from the sky.  The stars fall every night and sometimes twinkle bright in the blue day sky.  Ice falling out of the sky to bring us water.  It will be years before the water is flowing, covering the toxic sand deep as legends of home oceans.  Like full Basins but all over the planet.  Not just in tiny lakes or at the poles.

We are all lost in the desert.  I see a drift of code go by and refrain from seizing it, trying to fix it. Yasna says they are scorpions and venomous serpents and lizards and birds buried in the biomass, waiting to strike if I take the bait.

I ran a jumble of glass and metal flakes through my fingers and the tiniest of black beads began to acrete into scorpions, but they are and were deformed, legless, or legs only on one side.  Stingers longer than their bodies, they twitched sideways trying to stand up for me.  My bugs.  They turned their malformed heads to me as if in pain and I let them disintegrate into their bits before I could see into their shining eyes, the reflections of my ambition and my headstrong stupidity.

I should not say I was stupid.  If I had finished my training... if I had gone with my sisters as a team we might have fixed this problem, but I was young and stupid with hormones and desperately wanted Kyrus’s father to see me as worthy of his son.

I am only worthy of myself now.  Yasna says I always was worthy of myself.  Kyrus said I was worthy and I shouldn’t try so hard I’d run myself off a cliff.  The dust is thick today as if a wind-devil had thrashed it all into the air somehow.

I am dreaming of being crushed by the earth, my Kyrus buried in wet mud.  Why?  Wet?  There is no mud here.   

Water sinks into the sand and vanishes, leaving the surface powder set but dry. It is Milar, trying to kill him.  Light and Dark preserve my son.

**

Kyrus hefted the probing pole in his hands as he ran, tried to take a deep breath, choked and tried again. No wonder Milari are such warriors... He didn’t want to think about what they’d find under the mud. It would be like a sandstorm, only worse.

The mud that hadn’t buried that end of town was slowly oozing between buildings now, water running out before it. Tree trunks from the edge of the town dotted the mass of mud and stones. Crushed vegetation of all kinds and twisted mud-covered shapes that he didn’t want to look more closely at. Broken red roof tiles. Parts of the skeletons of buildings, the glitter of razor shards of glass here and there, a strangely clean broken blue tile.

Dotted here and there were knots of people probing where they thought their houses had been, searching for loved ones who had been home sick, but most of the town was gathered here, for their children.

Someone up ahead yelled “They’re buried, but everyone’s alive!” What? Oh, thank Light and Dark. People shouted back, scrambled up the syrupy slope, sludge flowing away under their feet as they tried to climb. “It’s the teachers! There’s at least one Dee making the mud flow elsewhere!” It was one of the professional manders a Seemander, lying pressed to the muck, hands buried to the wrists as he struggled to extend his feelings. “That’s all I can get!”

“Keep trying, Aetava. Ky... here work with Verpiccaus and Franghad! We need to get a hole open to them, for air if nothing else.” Ilax took Kyrus the Elder’s elbow. “Here, let us begin here.”

People were probing but the mud was liquid enough to fill every hole and every shovel taken away slumped full of muck from higher up.

“I can’t decline a whole mountainside,” Ver said worriedly. “My little sibs are in there.” 

Some cliners needed specific edges to work and break down and remove material. The mudslide was too big for them to remove at once, no one could hold that much mass at one time. Ky firmly set aside his last lingering horrors of his own mandery. He manifested an edge to the pole in his hands that shimmered faintly in the sun. Franghad, on the other side, set her mind to ‘becoming the mountain’ so that whatever Kyrus and Verpiccaus did would not slump into uselessness the moment they tried.

The world is edges, limits, this side and that side. A whole may be divided into two pieces, two pieces into four, four into eight. His idea of a sharpened pole... the whole length of it plunged into the mud, cut a circle in the muck. He could feel Franghad holding the edge he created, somehow it was as clear as a diagram in his head.