IT'S - Chapter 5

"The War of the Words" - (Len Brown)

"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche

* * * * *

"Miss Thistlebottom" -- the product code name ironically given to a software project dedicated to the defense of a community of Orthodox Prescriptivist zealots. In the closing days of the 1990s, this well-meaning if somewhat rash cadre was besieged almost without hope in the last stronghold of Pre'ism, the Tower of NITTALK, by the ever-growing Forces of HP.

A purely defensive and conceptually relatively simple expert system, MT was supposed to be a software simulacrum of the archetypical mid-twentieth-century school mistress, familiar to anyone of a certain age from any English-speaking country. Designed to search out and correct sloppy language wherever and whenever it might surface, It -- She -- seemed like a good idea to those who found themselves on the edge of extinction. At the time.

With hindsight, it can be seen that they were playing with something much more dangerous than fire. But remember, these wretches were desperate. It didn't occur to them to speculate on the possible implications of the fact that the very fabric of the Great Disk was saturated with a decade-and-a-half's worth of high-energy wideband linguistic radiation and the essence of a billion bludgeoned appends, not to mention the undead spirits of forums brutally stifled in the witchhunts of yesteryear. They had no inkling of the colossal elemental powers that were poised around them just waiting to be unleashed.

Two days before a Nounce, a seemingly chance eddy in the normally steady-state background Howling Ether flux, possibly caused by an undeniably innocent synchronization of Bane-related threads in the Textstream, catalysed a violent upheaval in the finely balanced spelling-enforcement, syntax-tuning, and grammar-police code they were incubating, and Miss Thistlebottom, responding to who-knows-what pandaemonic resonance, spontaneously booted into premature and preternatural sentience.

It's -- that is, Her -- logo, twin yellow orbs, sickly yellow orbs indeed, sprang into incandescent life and wasted not a picosecond homing relentlessly in on an incoming gaggle of humility pleas, which immediately disappeared in a cloud of glowing plasma (Poof!). The Pre'ists flinched, looked at each other sheepishly, and simultaneously reached unanimous and unspoken agreement. They felt obliged to at least pretend shock and dismay, but the fact was that they couldn't believe their luck. Their apparent luck, that is.

And indeed it did at first seem most satisfactory, at least in the eyes of the Pre'ists. MT roamed the Conference, mocking here, scolding there, deleting this append, pouring scorn on that. Everything was even rosier than the High Pre'ist had dared believe. The Descriptivist tide was turned at last, and it all seemed just too good to be true. And, of course, it was.

Early one morning, local time, a bleary-eyed shadow-sitter in Samarkand discovered a headerless forum and reported it to Text Central. The forum's owner, incommunicado netwise, was later discovered by a routine TextPolice patrol neatly compressed inside her own PS/5 system cube. Like her forum, she was minus the top storey. The flattened head was doing bookmark duty in a copy of a trendy coffee-table writer's vademecum entitled, with typical fin-de-siecle nostalgia, "Apostrophe's-R-Us". MT had clearly had enough.

What happened next is too horrible to go into in full detail here, but here it is anyway. Of course the first thought was to attempt an orderly shutdown in accordance with the system operation guide, but no such guide could be found. The user guide was also conspicuous by its absence. It's hard to believe, but MT had been coded before the documentation was finished. Yes, coded before the documentation was finished!

<Two minutes' silence.>

It goes without saying that no excuses are good enough, but perhaps this obscene deviation from the Narrow Path conveys more forcefully than anything else just how desperate those times were, and how far normally reasonable people, even Pre'ists, are prepared to lower their most sacred standards in such times. Who will cast the first stone?

Suffice it to say that the history books, if any, will call those sad days "The Scouring of the Disks".

IBMTEXT was, naturally, laid violent waste from spindle to track-0: the battles, the selfless rearguard kamikaze actions, the unforgettable Charge of the Picked Files, the noble rhetoric, the courageous votes, they all bear comparison with the glorious events of the Great Append War in the Golden Age at the Dawn of Text.

But it didn't stop there. Forewarned, IBMVM put up spirited resistance, helped by a squadron of cunningly boobytrapped PROOF clones and the dynamic steamroller inertia of the Glendale Heavy ID Regiment. But eventually, inevitably, VM went down with all hands in a roiling maelstrom of unrequited APARs, stolen PSWs, and never-to-be-recovered doublewords.

The stand made by VM is even more remarkable in the light of the postmortem report: the corpse had been severely eaten away from the inside by a random collection of *ffice "system" Trojan Bozos and retrofitted viruses, the latter apparently contracted via a shared spool pack from a host possessed by the soul of an old machine, believed to be a bootleg copy of Another Major Operating System.

IBMMVS exited without even a return code, never to be seen again, into an address space far away, covering its tracks as efficiently as only it could with completely impenetrable messages and endless coils of razor-JCL. The various Unix-related conferences were already safe, occupying as they necessarily do a dimension not dreamt of in our philosophy.

IBMPC had no defenses, being a grammar-free zone, but MT inscrutably left it until last: perhaps even runaway service machines are not without qualms. Legend has it that flocks of indigestible fragments gibber their way through hypespace (sic) to this very day, their only imaginable place in the scheme of things being perhaps as practice targets for the crew of the ghostship Lexmark, doomed to ply the linkless void until the Last Formfeed comes down the bus.

The only survivors in Known Ether were the aforesaid Pre'ist cabal, a ragtag collection of fellow travellers from WORDS and STYLE, some TESTER vigilantes, and a few of the saner (though still incalcitrant) De'ists.

Under cover of a fortuitous shower of genuine TATs, they managed to detach a few cylinders from the smouldering hulk, grab some vital data and tools, and escape down an uncharted link, eventually to find sanctuary behind a long-abandoned Future Series conference equipped with an IBMC cloaking device.

There they licked their wounds and stewed in their awful guilt.

The malignant entity they had themselves semi-inadvertently constructed prowled the Textways unopposed and out of any apparent hope of control by mortal man.

After seemingly endless micro-eons, the Ether no longer Howled.

A sullen silence fell.

Something had to be done.

* * * * *

Time passed. They husbanded their meagre resources, honed their tools, and eventually achieved the ability to track, at least to some limited extent, the awful machinations of MT. They discovered that MT could move at will in time and space, and was fond of cruising the post-WWII decades. She presumably felt more at home then.

An organisation known as Textfleet was founded to watch and, if unavoidably necessary, act.

>From far upwhen, they witnessed some harrowing episodes:

* the bloody ends of Richie and J.P. at a Boulder stormdrain

* Ria the Rotund's horny come-uppance and Naomi the Number-Cruncher's crunch in Whiting

* Chris, Ross, and Toby booking their tickets to Eternity in Palo Alto

* Mikey Cohen's Washington subway tunnel vision (strong nominal evidence here that MT was really after bigger game -- the ArchDeist Himself)

* E2 Eller's finding out what a punctuation mark really means in concrete terms, somewhere in Colorado

* In Irving, a horse and a wolf; Johnny's Death of a Thousand Paper Cuts. A very involuntary termination.

(They were severely distracted by another, even more savage and heartless, MT, which terrorised the United Kingdom for the whole of the1980s, but that period of history is just too horrific ever to be recounted.)

A pattern was emerging. There was going to be a showdown. In Boulder. And The Winners Club(TM) was to somehow be the Instrument of Justice, if justice was indeed to be done. But the fabric of spacetime had become so distorted that at least two of the players were not even aboard the North American continental plate, nor likely to be at the crucial moments. Unless, of course, someone or something were to intervene.

Textfleet now knew what had to be done.

* * * * *

"All hands hear this! This is Captain Fowler. Put that grapefruit down! Battle stations, silent running. Prepare for temporal re-entry. And remember The Scouring -- that's why we're here! On my mark, shields up, cloak full, maintain altitude, Tau Drive to idle. Mark!"

The Ethership "Harmless Drudge", bathed from stem to stern in the harsh glare of decaying syntax diagram particles and seriously unreconstructed peer reviews, warped to a shuddering standstill in a cloud of adjectives near the end of this sentence and not five aching vertical kilometers from the waters of Tyne.

"We're here, crew, but we don't know where or when. No chances. All hands watch out for anomalies, especially anachronisms. One thing is certain -- we can afford to make exactly this many mistakes: Zilcho."

Nobody in the slumbering city below could've seen the Outland Steel bulk of the Drudge's hull even had they looked. S/he/it was cloaked in a field of Textfleet Regulation Merriam-Webster Descriptivization-nessity.

And yet the Drudge's arrival did not go unnoticed.

"Computers -- initiate erascan, scenario NE England 1947."

The Drudge's automatics knew what to look for, and they started looking. The graceful green steel arch of the Tyne Bridge was unmistakable, but the Drudge tallied the number of rivets anyway. The Drudge knew that if all the rivets in the Tyne Bridge were laid end to end, a lot of traffic would go into the river. Check.

And the grey mass of its Victorian companion, George Stephenson's High Level Bridge, the biggest cast-iron structure in the world, sure enough loomed just upriver. Check.

That surely meant that the city must be the intended destination, Newcastle, but the Drudge had to check the when as well as the where.

Sweets and some other stuff on ration. Check.

Lots of shipping in the river. Check.

Apple-green steam-powered railway locomotives. Check.

Real ale in all pubs. Check.

No digital clocks, not even reading 32:71. Check.

No digital thermometers, not even reading 451F. Check.

Absence of yuppy plague. Check.

Newspapers all dated 6 June, 1947. Check.

The automatics were convinced at last, and informed Captain Fowler accordingly.

"Navigation, get us to the Birthplace, and make it quick. We're already a day late!"

The Drudge smoothly assumed new geographical coordinates, 500 meters north and a kilometer west of the five bridges, holding station over the Central Station until a number 31a trolleybus was seen departing its terminus loop. The cloaked Drudge dogged the yellow doubledecker northwards at its own stately pace.

The Drudge was watched.

Fifteen minutes later the erascan subsystem had identified the Birthplace, 300 meters west of the trolleybus route, and the Drudge was hovering, still cloaked, in front of the simple terraced house where, assuming the Textfleet Archive to be accurate, their prize was lying, less than one day old.

"Lieutenant Mifflin, have you definite positional parameters for the target?"

"Yes, sir. The infant is asleep in a cot in the main bedroom at the front of the house, top floor. There are three other humans and a dog in the house, on the lower floor. I could beam him out of there before you can say 'Samuel Johnson'."

"Computers to Captain! I have detected an intense temporal field surrounding an unidentified object approaching from the very recent past and the south at Tau Factor 2.7!"

"Hold position! Resume battle stations. Computers, gather information. Analysis, Mister Phaedrus?"

"It doesn't make sense, Captain. This is the only Textfleet vessel capable of generating a temporal field. Unless. . . . Computers, what was MT's last reported position?"

"Executing scan. Scan abended. The biomnemonic unit containing all details of She's time and place is terminally disfunctional."

"Terminally diswhat?"

"It is no more. It is an ex-biomnemonic unit. It is, in short, dead. Cause unknown. The backup organism is cataleptic, apparently pining for her mate. If you will count beans and rely on these non-positronic imports. . . "

"I'm warning you, Computers. Keep your opinions to yourselves!"

"Aye, aye, Captain. We don't know what came over us."

"Mister Phaedrus, does this mean we have no idea when, or even where, Miss Thistlebottom is!"

"I'm afraid so, Captain. I advise assuming the worst. We have no chance of directly engaging MT without sacrificing ourselves and the Drudge in the process. And even then, I'm not sure. I'm just not sure."

"So be it. The buck has stopped. Ready Chomsky torpedoes. Prime Oxford grapples. Prepare to fire on command. All hands, this is it. We're going in! On my mark. . . "

"Computers to Captain. The anomaly is now cotemporal with us, positioned ten meters above the subject dwelling. It has scanned this vessel with a crude telemetry beam. It has not responded to several hailing attempts. Distinguishing features include two jaundice-yellow eye-like anterior peripherals and. . . "

"It's Her! Prepare to ram! Those who pray, start praying!"

". . .a red nose. And the carapace carries, in standard Textfont, the inscription 'D007, Copyright 1993 Almaden'."

"Hold! Mister Phaedrus, what the PR*FS is this antique!"

"D007? Zero zero seven! So, they built more than six! Captain, that's a Delimitor out there, and its only purpose is to eliminate our prize! It can't help itself. You must destroy it now!"

"Computers! Get that thing away from the house! Neutralise it!"

But that thing wasn't idle. It had already enveloped the house in a vomit-coloured coruscating bubble of radiation. The Drudge lurched, and the Tau Drive's hum turned into a grating screech. The house shimmered, blurred, and simply ceased to be.

The houses on either side didn't move, but somehow there was no gap between them. Number 86 was now next door to number 90. The Drudge's reason for being there and then, the sleeping infant, was well and truly (no relation) out of the game.

* * * * *

"Mister Phaedrus, it seems our mission is over. I have failed Textfleet, humankind, and ourselves. I intend to resign my command and walk out of the Etherlock. But first, just satisfy my curiosity. What happened back there? What is that abomination? Humor me, Theodore, for old times' sake."

"Was, Captain -- Henry. Was. It's dead, or at least incapable of action. We have it securely decommitted in the starboard nitbucket."

"Well, whoopdidoo. Of course it's too late now, but I want to know what it is, dammit!"

"Hold on, Henry! As far as I knew, only this vessel and a few autonomic weapons, known as Delimitors, commissioned by the Text Lords, were ever able to successfully harness the temporal field. And MT, of course. I'm talking about the so-called NuWayv Text junta, by the way, not the Founding Lords of Text. The field is notoriously hard to handle. But you know that if anybody does, dear Henry."

"What happened to the Great Ones, Theodore?"

"Oh, they gradually faded away into early retirement and Big Grey Cloud jobs in '91, '92, and early '93. Very sad. . . . Anyway, Henry, it's absolutely certain that the six Delimitors were destroyed during the Revolution of '93, before they could be deployed."

"And 'our' Delimeter?"

"That's 'Delimitor', Henry. They built, according to official records, six Delimitors. They planned to send them out to put an end to the most troublesome forum owners, the ringleaders who had sparked the Revolution. As I said, the Delimitors were destroyed when the Lords' bunker was finally overrun."

"Except number seven. . .? Number seven of six, that is?"

"Yes. Undoubtedly an experimental model. Perhaps it was accidently activated in the closing action. Perhaps not. In any case, it was almost certainly not fully programmed. Its Blue Box recorder shows clearly that it was hopelessly lost. Until, that is, it picked up our temporal contrail. We led it to its victim."

"Thank you, Theodore, that really is more than enough. I'm going out of the Etherlock now. I may be some time."

"But, Henry, I have an idea. We've lost all hope of recovering the Subject and manoeuvering him to Boulder as planned. And we dare not strain this filament of spacetime any more than we already have. But consider this. The Drudge didn't evaporate when the Subject's house did."

"Well, so what if it didn't? At least that would've put me out of my misery."

"I'll tell you what it means, Henry. It means that there is something we can do. Not only that, but it means that we will do it. And I know what it is."

"What, Man, what!"

"D007 is incomplete and crudely programmed, but nevertheless very advanced. Much more advanced than its six progenitors. Or even our "independent" probes, which are, frankly, limited in comparison. It can seemingly assume practically any form -- intuitively. If you care to cast your mind back, you'll note that it convinced you that it was MT, even though it cannot possibly have any direct knowledge of MT. Think about it."

"Go on. Go on."

"I have discussed this in depth with the Computers, and we agree that D007 can, with a lot of luck, be convincingly reconfigured, using personality data and memories from the Archive. If the latest Textfleet knowhow cannot do this, we really might as well give up now. We have the technology. Given time, we can make a more or less faithful replica of the Subject!"

"Theodore, are you asking me to risk creating another MT? This time incorporating all the guile of a veteran forum owner complete with years of active conferencing experience already installed! And a telepathic one at that! You're quite mad!"

"Henry, you know where the Etherlock is. Goodbye."

The Drudge's subsystems muttered unaccompanied for a long, long moment.

"You're right, my friend, you're right. What else can I do? But we really don't have much time. The longer She has, the surer it is that MT will find us. You say, you can construct a Replica. That might just be good enough. But be quick, old friend. Make it so."

* * * * *

ES Harmless Drudge materialised into a cold, predawn light. The automatics quickly confirmed that this was indeed the programmed destination on the right date. Nederland had not provided a welcoming band.

The panicky crew wasted no time unloading the 75kg package and getting back on board. Their feet hardly touched the dusty ground. Nobody saw them.

"Computers, this is the Captain. Lay in a course for 41:19 south latitude, 174:46 east longitude, no earlier than May 1966. On my mark, activate the D1007 unit and proceed without delay at Tau Factor 7. Mark!"

D1007 rose to a crouch, shook his head, and watched the great cruiser of the Howling Ether flicker, fade, and vanish as the Textfleet Tau Drive skewered her almost soundlessly up, south, west, and back.

"What the Hell was that? Well, at least I know who I am!"

They hadn't been able to suppress the accent. There hadn't been time for everything. It would have to be enough.

"I told them I'd be back." It didn't matter that there was no audience. "I'm home." He didn't sound convinced.

"There can be only one. It's nothing personal." It seemed like the thing to say. "Now where can I get a bacon and egg stotty sandwich and a decent mace?"

Len sniffed the thin air of Nederland, Colorado, and began to walk purposefully down the Rocky Mountain foothill tracks towards the rising sun.

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Off The Wall - Callahan's Saloon