Jack L. Chalker Wonderland Gambit 2 The March Hare Network

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body. Wardrobe, jewelry, makeup I could do almost by wishing or imagining, but
physical changes no.
I probably could manage with a wig; I tried some hats, and they stayed.
But for now I pretty well said the hell with it.
I sat down on the toilet and tried to figure out what to do next.
This wasn't, after all, the first time I'd been plugged into this kind of
energy and been able to use it. I just hadn't been able to use it this well or
this precisely before. Now, I had no idea what an Inga should look like except
in my mind; the 3-D wireframe showed that something else had done a hell of a
piece of programming probably another computer way be-yond what I'd known and
what I was doing was becoming the operator.
It was the equivalent of sitting at a keyboard with a view of, say, Chalmette,
on a screen in front of me and typing instructions.
If I was a keyboard, the energy linkage was the cord that at-tached me to the
computer that actually did the job. I'd as-sumed until this moment that it was
the one at the institute, but was it? In one way it made sense if they didn't
know where I was, give me the wild card to get out of any nasty situation,
af-ter which they could trace me and turn it off. Maybe but maybe not. What if
the other group had tapped the phones in and out of the institute and the
Stanford Medical Internet connection, hoping they could intercept me? Maybe I
was connected to Rick!
How to tell? Once I dealt with my own little battles here, I would have to
leave and link up with somebody somewhere. I needed information, and I
needed it not only on the other end but also on the various capabilities and
lim-itations of this thing. I had a sudden thought that seemed so dumb that I
almost threw it away in embarrassment, but then I decided that dumb or not,
nothing was impossible these days.
"Query help system,"
I shot out, trying to direct it to the en-ergy flow and out the top of my
head.
"?"
I almost stood straight up. That was a response! A prompt?
"What computer am I networked into?"
"Central core."
That wasn't getting me anywhere.
"Whose computer am I linked to? That is, who is the authority that operates
it?"
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"Master stabilization program is automatic."
I sighed. Even on this level it was still a damned machine.
"Immediate location of other end of energy link between subject operator
and physical computer?"
"Site twenty-seven dash G."
Rats. It was both exciting and frustrating. Somehow I had managed to link up
not with one of the computers in this uni-verse but with something beyond it!
Something real
. But un-fortunately, getting that far had removed any useful frame of
reference.
Maybe I was being too ambitious.
"Name of operator who transmitted device to this operator to link to network?"
"Sysop March Hare Network."
Aha! So it wasn't
Al! That was exciting.
"Why did I lose my hair when I was connected?"
"Integration of netlinker replaced code."
Okay, that was something.
"Why can't I have the hair back now ? "
"Netlinker includes code which freezes subject code to guarantee solid
linkup."
Good lord!
"Do you mean that physically I'm stabilized per-manently like this?"
I was pregnant, after all. Did that mean that even that was frozen?
"Yes. Even that is frozen,"
the help system agreed.
"What will unfreeze it?"
"Cessation of netlinker at the source."
So I couldn't even turn it off. The March Hare, whoever he was, could, but for
now I was playing his game. At least his game wasn't Al's game.
I began to gingerly probe the help system on just what I could and could not
do. Like the rest, it took quite a while to get any kind of frame of reference
that made sense, but once I got it, there seemed to be some clearcut rules.
Anything I could see, hear, touch the things that interacted with me
personally I could alter within a broad range of probabilities. The data link
and bandwidth were the most limit-ing factors, which was why I couldn't turn
Oakland into Chicago or give everybody wings or the like. I did, however, work
out a system with the query help that proved very handy. I'd think of what I
wanted to do, and help would inform me if it was within my limits to do it.
There was also a sort of caution. Every time I used it, there was
measurable activity on that energy level that would be detectable by anyone
who knew what to look for and had the right equipment and was looking, which
meant Al and Les and the gang. Not that I couldn't use it, but if I went nuts
over it, I might well be tracked or traced. It was, therefore, best to use it
when I had to or on very limited things I'd already worked out.
Fair enough.
Even with the limitations, it's nearly impossible to convey the difference
when you go from nearly total powerlessness to this kind of power and
confidence. Okay, so I had to waddle around and be bald, but that was a small
price to pay for being able to do pretty much what I wanted without fear.
Jewelry, clothes, money, even people waiting on me all the time easy, almost a
snap of the fingers.
And I was antsy, uncomfortable, and pissed off. You couldn't even impress
anybody. Once you decided that something was so like everybody loved you it
was like it had always been that way, and even you started getting memories of
how every-thing came off to make it different.
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That, I realized, was how the damned Brand Boxes worked, how even the big deal
worked.
There was one reality, one solid world that was probably not like the two I
could remember in detail but pretty comfortable. Now, somebody has some kind
of hang-up, and he's the first to get in there or die or whatever, and so that
hang-up, no matter how far back in the mind it was, comes out. Some white guy
born and raised in a rural southern back-ground might fantasize that the South
won the Civil War. Okay, so that becomes truth, and everything is filled in
around it, shaped to fit it. What kind of a computer that would require and
how much memory I didn't want to think about, but there it was.
That was what happened when I created something, too, whether it was new shoes
or a new attitude or changing somebody's race or family background or you name
it. Everything adjusted so that it was always like that, at least to everybody
but me, the operator running the automatic Do
It program.
You could materialize ruby slippers right in front of them, and poof!
Instantly the slippers had a history. knew it because I'd created them, but
I
I also knew the history that had been filled in behind them for everybody
else.
If you got into a new universe without dying, you were kind of like the
creator. You knew, but nobody else did unless he came in the same way.
Okay, so now I knew the system, but I didn't know what the hell good it was
doing me to stick around at that point. I mean, how the hell could you get
revenge on somebody who'd never know it, and how much could you do to help
people who wouldn't remember they were ever in trouble?
Well, I did one thing for the girls and some of the men as well. I took 'em [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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