Squiggle Pie

Maria

Maria stalked off down the corridor, rejecting the words of the man following her with a backward chop of her hand, speeding up to put as much distance between him and herself as possible.

"Madam, we must analyze this case! This is the first time anyone has survived a ghost’s attack, and--"

Maria stopped in her tracks to turn and glare at him. "If you were to check your records, you'd find that at one time or the other, all the Ghosts were attacked by such an entity. We're all still around. Others have survived on occasion as well. Check your data before making assertions."

"But not in the last fifty years. I doubt the ghosts attacking our cities now are the same as those who played in Fantasma--"

"Played?" Maria said coldly.

"Well, the death toll was not so--"

Maria seemed intent on never allowing the man to finish a sentence. "Not so high? Do you imagine that mattered to the hundred or so people who ended up dying?"

"Well, you managed to stop the--"

"They stopped themselves."

"But--"

Maria tilted her head to the right a little, raised a puzzled eyebrow. "Do you think you have any better idea than I of what happened in Fantasma six hundred years ago?"

"No, of course not, but--"

"Do you think I am not considering every aspect I can to try to come up with some solution?"

"Well, no--"

"Then why not let me be about it?"

"Now look here madam--"

Maria shook her head tiredly and continued westward, deeper into the city's center. She glanced up at the ceiling, where the golden sodium vapor lights were being replaced by a worker in Caliente's gold-and-violet uniform.

"A ghost hit here," the man said to the security officer following Maria, eliciting a snort of laughter. "Ghosts been poppin' out the lights down here these last days. Somethin's sure got them stressed."

Maria studied the lights, her face impassive. "These are sodium vapor lights at 256 kilovolts, not so?"

"Yeah, we're working on putting them back down to 128 though, possibly going over to potassium vapor."

Maria winced as she imagined the mess potassium vapor would make of some fool who broke the bulb and breathed the stuff. "Why not argon, or helium?" she wondered. Both were major components of Mercury's poor excuse for an atmosphere, easy to work with, and not even toxic.

The worker looked at her as if she had died and come back to life in front of him. "We always use sodium and potassium. We've never used anything else. Anywhere on Mercury since the Shifts."

Maria nodded, gestured to a broken tube sitting on the ground against the tunnel wall. "May I see that?"

"You can have it, if that's what pumps your coolant," the man said with an irritated shrug. "I gotta get back to work here."

Maria picked up the broken tube and turned it over in her hands. The device was simple, and had much the same principles behind it as it had for fifteen hundred years. There was a set of wires on either side of the hollow tube, into which the electrodes were plugged. Maria tapped the end with a finger, and it popped off. Revealed inside it was the power jump, a thin wire set through the outer wall of the tube, which carried the excess power when the light was not on full. The tube was not just a light; it was a power conduit, and a sensor as well, as the fine network of sensor elements on the outer skin suggested.

She studied the control chip for a moment, and raised a puzzled eyebrow. "Is this a standard interface?" she asked the worker.

He glared down at her, one hand holding the new light in its socket as he peered down to look at the dead one. He blinked, and reached up to attach the new light before letting himself drop from the wall.

He took the dead light from Maria and studied it with a deep frown. "Not from this city," he said emphatically. "This beast's a monster power conduit, gotta hold megavolts. We don't use anything like this in Caliente. Maybe in the Core, but not here..."

Maria looked at the arrangement of power elements and ran a finger over the gold leads of the metal wires. They were arrayed in a complex spiral pattern, hundreds of them. The standard held maybe four elements, and three of those powered the light. Maria frowned as she spotted an element not a part of the device's greater structure.

It seemed to be a computer interface, and not the basic bipolar port that linked lights into the city's intranet, either. This was a high-capacity data link such as Fantasma's original computers used.

Maria took her portable from her belt and plugged the lead into the broken light, and jumped as the smaller computer squealed with the input alert of a very high-capacity download. To strain the processor of even the modest 2048-megahertz processor the download would have had to be greater than the city's intranet systems would have forced. Maria tapped the gold control squares of the computer and called up "analyze," and tilted her head back with surprise as the computer whined to a full lockup.

The light exploded with the blue-white crackle of an electrical discharge, and she jumped and nearly dropped it. The security officer leapt forward and knocked it out of her hands, sending it spinning over the black stone to smash into pieces against the wall. "Why did you do that?" Maria demanded.

"That discharge would have killed you!"

Maria looked down at her hands, slowly leaking blood. Only the blood was like golden quicksilver, and it congealed into tight droplets on her skin as she looked down at them. "If Del never killed me, that little bug-zapper wouldn't," Maria muttered. The worker and the guard stared at her hands, confused. Maria wiped them on her leg, and shook her head. "Perhaps something can be salvaged--"

But she looked over at the pile of shattered feldspar glass and metal, and even as she watched the fragments melted away into a big puddle of slag. The rock underneath liquefied slightly, and the heavier material sank into it. "Seems to have had some power left in it," the worker said with a snort. "The ghosts' own powers, I'd say." He touched his portable, checking the new light with the city's grid, then snapped it off it a satisfied nod. "You better get outta here. Ghosts been here, and this place belongs to evil now."

With that sound advice, he walked carefully around the discolored spot on the floor, and walked away down the tunnel.

-----

"Unknown protocols," the computer in front of Maria reported.

Again.

"Check for correlations between these data and analyses of all known Fantasma, Imperial, Tarazedi, Provocateur, and Paradigm code groupings, as evolved since the Star siege."

"Function will take approximately four hours to--"

"Proceed," Maria said, leaning forward with a deadly gleam in her eyes.

As though the computer understood her ire, it set to work, whirring through chapters on MercNet at maximum speed. The original code systems were recorded, the last Maria knew, in Fantasma's original archives. Indeed, probably every arcane chit, chunk, and chain of data on Mercury was sitting in the massive computer systems embedded in what was once Fantasma Ops's west wall. She could probably find her first notes from her hideout there: "Cybrids grouping to west. Strike Petrarch. Grab some EMPs."

Maria sighed. Mercury, these last few weeks, seemed to suck. She wished some of the other Ghosts were around to help with the investigations. Carrot, perhaps, with his quirky semi-Cybrid logic. Razorback and Xenogears with their unique perspective. Ko'ah, with his strange Tarazedi ways.

Altas was in Brandenburg, unconscious, so Maria heard. She'd gone to him shortly after she saved the young girl from the attack, but found him to be in basic hibernation mode, set on a two-month timer. She didn't have his help either, now, so the only Ghost on Mercury was frozen like an overloaded computer.

Thought of Ghosts turned her back to the data, and she studied a chunk of the code on one of the smaller screens.

(0 7]]]1]]4] 3]]3]9]] /\t)
(0 8]3]]]3] 0)
(0 2]]]3]6]]] 0)
(0 5]6]3]]] 0)
(0 8]]9]1]] 1]]9]]5] 4]1]]1]]] 0)
(0 7]]3]6]] 0)
(0 8]1]]]1]] 0)
(0 3]]]1]]4] 0)
(0 3]8]3]] /\t)
(0 2]]]3]6]]] + 4]1]]1]]] == 2]]]3]6]]]4]1]]1]]] == 4]1]]1]]] + 2]]]3]6]]] 0)
()
((0 3]8]3]] /\t 7]]]1]]4] 0) == 3[]]1]]4]1]]5]9]]2]]])
()
((3[]]1]]4]1]]5]9]]2]]])/\t*9090 == {8]6]]]4]]8]6]]]8]5]6]})
((3[]~1]]4]1]]5]]]9]2]])~ -> /\t*9090)
((/\t*9090 == ! , 9090*/\t == 0 {!})
((/\t == 0))
({null})
((3[]~1]]4]1]]5]]]9]2]])~ -> /\t == 0 -> {null})
((7]]]1]]4] /\t -> 3]8]3]] /\t -> {3]1]]4]1]]//5]]]9]2]]] == ~} -> 9090*/\t)
(9090*/\t -> null)
()

Maria frowned deeply. This was no computer code. This was a message, written in a mathematical language.

And a human had written it. Maria could not quite understand it, but she could tell that whoever was writing it was trying to convey something urgent. Repetition of several concepts suggested that the sender was trying to underline something, trying to drive it into the reader's head so the meaning would be unmistakable.

Maria found the references to pi odd. Pi suggested circles, or ellipses, or something similar. She froze the block of text and read through the longer strings again.

"Pi yields... delta t?" Change in time? Passage of time? Maria wondered. "Delta t equals zero yields null..." Null what?

Maria felt a growing unease, but she wasn't sure why. The data seemed to crawl through the pit of her stomach and increase her pulse rate. Her pulse was increasing, she realized, and she was sweating. She wiped a droplet of moisture from her forehead, noticing her hands were trembling.

"714 delta t yields 383 delta t yields pi... pi is equal to...?" What was that squiggly thing? "Squiggly thing AKA pi yields 9090 times delta t..."

"And 9090 delta tees yield... null."

Null.

"Death," she whispered. "If pi has a squiggle in it, delta t becomes zero, and null results. It's a warning."

But how would pi get a squiggle in it? What was the squiggle? It made little sense. Pi must mean something, possibly a circle or a round object somewhere.

"714, 339, delta t." she said. "383 delta t. Everything else is zero. Except 236 and 411. Put them together and you get 236411. Attaching two separate entities and they retain their identity..."

That was odd mathematics, to say the least. Maria stared at the 236 and 411 until her eyes began to burn. They were put together to make one entity, but remain two entities...

"Razorback and Xenogears!" she snapped, sitting bolt upright in her chair. "But what the hell base is this in?"

The 236 had to be Xenogears. It came first, and Maria saw that the 411 originally entered the picture bundled with two other numbers, presumably Ko'ah and Altas, who had joined the Ghosts at the same time. So the list of entities at the beginning was a roster of the Ghosts.

714, one of the pieces tied in with the delta t and the nulls, had to be Maria herself. The 383 was Eidolon, the last of the Ghosts to join... and they alone of the Ghosts had the ability to manipulate time: delta t.

"So, me times Eidolon times delta t yields pi... which results in something very bad?" Maria was puzzled. The last time she had seen Eidolon had been several hundred years ago, at the galactic center. She had no idea where she was now or what she was doing... perhaps that was the problem.

"My friend, what are you messing with now?" Maria murmured.

Was Eidolon putting a squiggle in the pi?

-----

MAR DEL /\t
ICE
XEN
TYC
KOA ALT RAZ
JEH
IZA
CAR
EID /\t

XEN + RAZ == XENRAZ == RAZ + XEN

(EID /\t MAR 0) == d.aratlx

d.aratlx null == infinity
d.arabox ~ -> null
null == (danger?) , null == 0 {danger}
(when?) /\t == 0, null

d.arabox ~ -> null (point taken)

MAR /\t -> EID /\t -> d.ara // box (?) == ~ -> null

Maria glared at her notes, wishing they would just make sense. The universe had order to it, often a perverse and vicious order, but order nevertheless. Rarely was it just so blasted stupid and incomprehensible.

Eidolon and Maria make "d.aratlx" which multiplied by nothing equals infinity... but...

D.ara "box" had a squiggle in it. Squiggle pi. Maria had a sudden vision of the proprietor for Caliente Cakes up in the main plaza holding a tray full of piping hot squiggle pies. "Only delta t scarps, come get your fresh, hot, squiggle pies--!"

Maria got the idea that "null" was a bad thing. Indeed, it sounded rather nasty. But the difference between the two d.aras was beyond her, indeed, whatever a d.ara was was beyond her.

"Linguistics. Study: 'ara'. Affix letter 'd.'"

"Constellation Ara, as seen from Earth. D Arae is a star approximately two hundred light years from Earth. Delta Arae--"

:Next." She'd swing by and check it out, but that was a sector of little note.

"From Latin meaning 'altar.' Affixing of D may indicate the temple of Delphi, noted for--"

"Forget it," Maria muttered. There would have to be hundreds of references to "d.ara" in the linguistics databases, and it seemed much more likely that the answer was mathematical.

A voice with an odd accent interrupted her musings. The sound was strange: most Mercurians had one of three accents: Fantasma blend, Western end clipping, and Core precision. This voice had none of those; rather the voice mixed Rs and Ls and clipped off vowels into a rapid-fire, staccato soprano--

"Maria! Where the hell have you been?"

Maria turned slowly, and allowed the faintest of smiles. "Hello, Del."

-----

The two sat and regarded each other silently for a moment. Del was dressed in some kind of light armor, white with red trim and gold shield threads. Maria recognized the colors of the Children of the Phoenix's Searcher Guild, a unit dedicated to locating the lost Immortal Harabec Weathers, said to be the founder of the Children. How had Del fallen in with them?

Del looked little different, physically, than the last time they had met, some five hundred years ago. Del's red hair was chopped short, as always, though with the faintest tinge of gray at the temples. Del's lips down turned as she noticed Maria's raised eyebrow, and the older woman shook her head. There was little to be gained by this stare down, and she could tell by the look in Del's eyes that she felt the same.

Maria extended a hand, and Del took it immediately. Maria stiffened as a powerful current shot through her, considerably more intense than the megavolts she had recently absorbed from the light. With the energy came flashes of thought, emotion, and memory; in short, Del transferred most of her experiences of the past few centuries to her.

I have not been quite idle either, Maria sent along the bond, and allowed herself to enter a meditative state, enhancing her conscious mind's control over her thoughts, so she could sift the relevant from her mind and toss the clearest picture of her last five hundred years at Del. The other woman gave her a negative thought, and Maria nodded and allowed Del to just download the whole mess to be sorted out later.

"I've missed you," Del said quietly a moment later, after they released the bond. Maria allowed her agreement to flow through the fading connection, and nodded slowly.

Del extended her hand, palm up, and a blue rose grew from her fingertips, slowly unfurling, gleaming as it caught the room's gold and violet light. The rose's stem grew into a curve, bending the blossom back until it touched Del's palm. With a shimmer of light, it melted into her palm and disappeared. An instant later, a flash of blue momentarily blinded Maria, and when she looked again, there was a small, rectangular bundle in Del's palm.

Maria picked it up, unwinding the piece of vine that wrapped around both axes of the bundle. The vine instantly grabbed onto her wrist and fastened around it, its ends tying together of their own accord. Maria spread out the bundle-- cards-- on the table and shook her head with a sad smile. "It has been awhile, indeed," she said softly, as she inspected the cards.

It was a scarp deck, and Maria noted that the Rose was drawn with particular care. More ornate than any of the other cards, even the Ghost, the Rose on its black background seemed to glow with azure light.

The Ghost was drawn in stark black, gold, and white, and Maria nodded acknowledgement as she studied it. It was a female figure shrouded in black, carrying a white rose in her right hand and a copper sword in her left. A sun overhead gleamed pure white, while a stone at her feet was drawn with fine lines of gold and white on the black background. Maria turned the card to the light, and watched with interest as the face of the card grew darker as the light hit it.

"What're you up to here?" Del asked as she looked at Maria's computer screen, seeing it just fine despite being a number of meters away.

Maria grimaced. "You tell me."

Del's eyes narrowed. "I'm not sure I want to," she said. "Looks like something bad..."

"I figured that much out."

"Seen any of the Ghosts lately? Altas was here?" she added before Maria opened her mouth. "How'd he-- oh. A month?" Maria began a nod. "I bet I can fix him up before then. I'll be back."

Del vanished, leaving Maria to set up the cards with a bemused expression.

The squiggle-pie code burned in amber on the screen, and seemed to gleam cruelly off the reflective surface of the Knife, the essence card for Death.

-----

Dreams were interesting things. Dreams were especially interesting for Maria, who usually did not even have them.

She stood on the edge of a Mercurian cliff. The gold and purple of the aurora danced over the city. She stood in the vacuum and breathed sunlight, something she had not been able to do in fifty years. She felt uneasy, wondering when her fragile bubble of safety would pop and she suffocate/burn/explode.

Below the aurora the city shined. Gold and purple lights in a spider web pattern flashed as the traffic of the city wandered by in front of them. As Maria watched, some of the lights blinked off and did not return.

It started at the city center and spread slowly clockwise. Horror made Maria's breath catch in her throat as the rest of the city's lights blinked out in one terrible instant, leaving nothing but a ring of violet lights in a circle around the outermost edge of the city.

Explosions lit the city center, their light much brighter than the lights had been. Maria was frozen, helpless, unable to help, unable to call up any of her powers to assist.

The explosions became a lower-case n, then two more on either side turned the letter into a fiery pi.

"No, no, this cannot happen--" Maria said softly, her voice stolen by the shockwave of the explosion, gentle in Mercury's thin atmosphere. Ionization of the sodium and potassium released huge clouds of purple and orange light, which became denser, obscuring the city entirely. When the discharge faded, the city was gone without a trace, except for a purple ring of light with the symbol of pi in the center.

A girl's voice giggled over the aether, and Maria whirled, to see a little black-shrouded form standing on a ridge behind her, silhouetted against the sun. "Maria!" the child said with a delighted laugh.

"Who are you?" Maria demanded, breaking into a low-grav run.

"See the city, watch it die," the girl said, her voice losing its giggling.

"It doesn't need to die!" Maria said angrily.

The child's voice became frightened, and her figure began to fade, allowing the sunlight to shine through. "I don't like death, so thus I cry."

"Child, wait..." Maria said, coming to a halt, standing there reaching out a hand in entreaty.

"Won't you have some squiggle pie?"

The child vanished, and the sun exploded to envelope all the land around Maria as she awakened.

"Damnit," Maria whispered, as she sat up in bed in her darkened room.

She stood slowly and went to the table to turn on the computer system. She ordered the machine to run a status scan of the entire city. After a few minutes, it began to spit reports at her. There were a few reports of power outages in the city center, medical response to a Ghostwolf collision in the transportation center.

Nothing noteworthy, in other words.

Maria stared at the scarp deck sitting on the table and sighed. "Del?" she said quietly. "I could use your help."

Del was either not listening or no longer on Mercury, and Maria set up the cards for a game of paradigm, assuming Del would choose Life as she always did. Maria herself chose Death as opposed to her usual Shade, because she doubted she would find any security in the coming days...

-----

The next morning, Del had returned, to Maria's surprise. She'd got sort of used to the other woman's decade-long absences, and really had not expected to see her for a long time.

Less did she expect to see her companion.

"Icey!" Maria said more loudly than she'd intended. As if afraid she'd get complaints from the neighbors, she said in a near whisper, "Good to see you. Where have you been?"

Icey grinned and extended a hand. Maria grasped it, blinking as she felt the distinct touch of Delithita within the bond. She quirked an eyebrow and took Del's hand as well, and was momentarily disoriented by the dissonance in the link.

"Well. Now I know where you've been," Maria said, smiling faintly. "Or at least, who you've been with. Congratulations..."

Maria released their hands and shook her head. She wondered exactly when this had happened, and how. Icey had been pursuing Del for a very long time, though cautiously. He did not want to fire Del's legendary temper, and she had not showed any reciprocal interest. As Maria recalled, Del had kissed Icey back in 2834...

Icey laughed, and Maria realized that her thoughts were a bit more visible than she'd intended. "Yeah, the little lass gave me the runaround for awhile..."

"Five hundred years," Del mumbled, casting a loving glance at her mate. "Foolish me."

"Scarp, eh?" Icey said, indicating the deck on the table with his left hand, which Del held.

"Paradigm," Maria corrected. "I came up with it recently. Del has played."

"Play a game?"

Maria was about to reply in the affirmative when another presence entered the room. The Cybrid did not bother to knock, seeing it as he did as inefficient and wasteful of time. This was especially so considering his method of entry: walking through the door as though it did not exist.

His green eyes were unreadable, even to his friends. "There is trouble."

"Specify," Maria said.

Altas studied her coldly. "You know of the Immortal Brotherhood?"

"I was a member once... some nine hundred years ago. But then you know this." Maria regarded the Cybrid with a worried look. Altas did not ask rhetorical questions unless he was deeply disturbed...

"They are still on Mercury."

"Impossible," Delithita said flatly. "They were absorbed by the Paradigm Sect Cybrids centuries ago."

"They have effected their release," Altas said in a tone that matched Del's. "Furthermore, they have reorganized within the Mercurian cities of Fur Elise and Brandenburg."

"Explain," Maria said. Altas was stressed... so Maria knew something very bad was going on.

"The reason the records regarding the psi factor of the ghost attacks were deleted, is that the Brotherhood deliberately suppressed those findings. To the purpose of concealing their own psi abilities."

"Psi abilities?" Icey frowned. "But they had biomech brains. Of what relevance is biological psi ability to their own?"

Altas looked ready to go for Icey's throat-- or Maria's. He leveled a ferocious glare at her, and Maria was momentarily taken aback, until she controlled her confusion and matched Altas's look with a cold stare resurrected from the old days as the Ghosts' leader. "The Brotherhood, around the leadership of one Stryker--" and here Maria's eyes widened-- "Have over the last fifty years been stealing neurotransmitters from those dead of ghost attacks."

Del slammed her fist into the stone wall, sending chips of basalt flying with the force of the impact. "I'll kill them all once and for all."

"More data," Altas said, his green eyes flashing with a dangerous light. "One of the Ghosts' old security protocols was used to delete the information. Maria's."

Maria made no response to that, though inwardly her thoughts were awhirl with mingled horror, dismay, and fury. To think one of the Ghosts believed she could...

Del was the first to respond to Altas's accusation. As Maria moved forward to stop her, the other woman became a pillar of star-bright flame. Red light filled the room as she grabbed Altas by the upper arms, spun once, and flung him at incredible speed into the wall. There was a loud cracking noise, and when the light dimmed-- only slightly-- Altas was embedded ten centimeters deep into the wall. Green sparks shot out of his body, arcing into the walls and floor, as Del towered over him, yelling in a voice that was not only deafening but somehow carried subsonics that made the rock itself tremble. "You stupid Cybrid snotbag! How can you think Maria--"

Something amazing happened. Icey reached out and touched Del's arm, and as he did so, the light flowing from Del vanished. As Maria watched, Del calmed down, relaxed, and sighed. "I'm sorry, Altas," she said in an apologetic voice. "But surely you must know Maria could never do such a thing."

Altas still looked ready to murder someone. "See for yourself. Maria's codes were used. And remember that all we Ghosts have used psychic encryptions for our security systems for at least three hundred years. No one could break in. Not even I."

Maria shook her head. "Tell me more about these Brotherhood members." She shook her head, muttered, "Am I ever going to lose those damned people?"

"When the Liberated Elite hit Triton in 2846, they crushed the humans there and they evacuated. Conveniently, your little orbital arrangement threw them out of the system, and with their space forces crippled, they're stuck riding Triton out into blackness." Maria nodded; she'd dropped Triton into the Stardream system in a highly elliptical orbit that unfortunately (for Triton at least) took it into a terminal encounter with one of Stardream's original planets... at perihelion. The gravitational effects hurled the planet out of the system.

"Part of the Elite were the Brotherhood members who'd been captured," Icey guessed.

"Incorrect. The Brotherhood members managed to capture a number of Orion Faction pilots and transfer their brains over to these unwilling donors. These then evacuated to Mercury, and eventually settled in the Core."

"So you believe the Brotherhood is somehow responsible for the ghost attacks?" Maria asked.

Altas looked directly at her, and his expression was colder than even Maria's. "No. I believe you are manifesting them on the Brotherhood's behalf."

Maria did not know whether to laugh, cry, or slit her fellow Ghost's synthetic throat. Del did not fly into a rage. Icey seemed to be moderating her emotions, calming her. Maria shook her head slowly, and dismissed Altas with an impatient sweep of her hand. "I am not responsible for your errors of perception," Maria said quietly and with a calm drawn from some inner reserve.

Altas regarded her for a moment longer, then vanished. Icey released Del's arm, shaking his head. "Poor Alt. He doesn't know what he's saying. Besides, we already know what's doing it."

"What's that?" Maria demanded, but in Del's eyes she saw the answer.

The other woman's eyes watered with tears of shame, as she said softly, "I am."

-----

"You're my honeybunch snookums snookums--"

Maria watched as a city fell to flaming wreckage, burning out quickly into blackened rubble in the near vacuum. Maria threw a rock into the wreckage in impotent fury.

"You're the squiggle in my pie--" the child's delighted voice concluded the ancient poem with a cheery laugh as the city's rubble vanished in a gold-and-purple aurora.

Maria reached out for the child, encountered only vacuum--

Maria awakened with a start, and lay there in bed for a few minutes. That damned child! Couldn't she see the havoc she'd cause?

Who was she, anyway?

Maria stood and went to the cabinet behind the mirror. She drew a cup of water with one hand while she opened the cabinet and withdrew a jar of dark, reddish-brown powder with the other.

She'd created her new body to not require food; rather it drew its energy from the zero-point like her non-corporeal form. She did need water, though, and air, and one other thing.

She poured a bit of the powder into the water and stirred it with her finger. The lumpy stuff wasn't very soluble, but she got it mixed thoroughly. She inhaled the sweet scent as she lifted the cup to her lips.

Cinnamon. Once she had enjoyed cinnamon tea, until she had decided she hated tea and cinnamon water tasted just as good. She did not consciously plan the functioning of her senses when she rebuilt herself, and to her dismay she found the only flavor she could still taste was cinnamon-and-sugar.

Altas's angry words haunted her as she sat on the edge of the stone counter and sipped the water. He really thought she would murder a couple thousand people-- in such a terrible fashion-- for the Brotherhood? Altas obviously didn't know much of her relations with the organization she had formerly been a member of. She'd had to hide on Venus in a ghost town for several years-- alone-- to avoid their assassination attempts. She'd nearly lost her sanity entirely as the city's valiant artists had haunted her. Maria had the song "Ashes in the Wind" disturbing her dreams even centuries later.

The Brotherhood tried to see her killed a number of times after that, lastly just before she left for Mercury in 2828. They tried to shoot down her shuttle in an "accidental" weapons discharge at the Los Angeles Metroport. And Petresun (Lord rest his soul, Maria thought sarcastically) sent them to Mercury looking for her... when he figured out that they still had not quite finished the job.

And now they were back. Again. Maria shook her head, feeling every one of her nine hundred thirty-six years. She wished she could just discorporate, search Mercury and Stardream's single other planet, locate each of the dirtbags, and turn them into quantum goo puddles.

"Quantum goo puddles," she said aloud, and shook herself. That was nearly as absurd as squiggle pie.

She looked at the screen, noting the bundle of code that she had not cleared. The next chunk of data was written in much the same fashion as what she had read before, and the computer had obligingly provided a translation.

? -> d.ara
? -> null
d.ara // box == ~
~ + 3.1415926 -> (null)
(MAR ^-/\t) + (DEL ⁺/\t) -> [0,1,9090]
(DEL 9090) + (ALT /\~ {MAR ^-/\t) -> /\t*9090
d.arabox == /\t*9090
/\t*9090 == (null)
@ (t_{ALT /\~}) && (t_{MAR /\t}) @@ d.ara -> d.ara // box
null + DEL 9090 -> ALT /\~
ALT /\~ + MAR 9090 -> /\t
/\t + d.ara -> d.ara // box
~ == null

Maria shook her head. The code was meaningless to her. She did not understand most of the terms, and barely understood paradigm it was written in. There was a message, but though she stared at the screen until her eyes burned, she could not interpret it.

She typed on the screen for a moment, bringing up a list of those killed by the ghosts. The letters "DARA" did not show up anywhere.

Frustrated, she was about to shut the screen down when she looked at the top two lines of the code. "Unknown yields 'dara'. Unknown yields null..."

She ran through the list of next-of-kin for the deceased, then ran up another search for the characters.

There was a Padara Mishyia, a male of about fifteen years. His father had been killed ten years previously. She shook her head and continued down the list.

Dara Dixi, daughter of Mira Dixi, deceased 3492. Maria tried to call up an image, but was shocked to find there wasn't one.

She pulled up the mother's data, and found her mother, Ranona Dixi, had also suffered a ghost attack in 3477.

There was no image available of either woman.

This was unheard of. Maria searched for other references to the family, and was able to find multitudes of photographs of Mira's brothers, father, cousins, aunts, and grandparents. Dara had about twelve cousins, and Maria was able to find no less than forty-seven images of the youngest, who was barely three.

But nothing on the girl, her mother, or her grandmother.

Grimly she set to work hacking into their school records, accessing the records of their psi ratings. The grandmother, she found, had the incredible rating of nine hundred eighty. Mira Dixi was even higher: some twelve hundred fifty.

The girl had not yet had a psi evaluation test.

Maria called up the address of the girl, and found it to be down in the depths of the city, near the core.

She shut down the screen and threw back the rest of her drink. Somehow it didn't seem to taste so sweet now.

-----

Maria came around the bend in the branching corridor to find Altas waiting for her. His arms were folded across his chest and his eyes were narrowed. "I knew it," he said quietly. "I have had a tap on your computer for some time. You have been busy."

"Do you not agree with my conclusions?" Maria demanded. "This child is in danger! Her mother and grandmother both suffered ghost attacks, and she'll be next in line!"

"I believe you," Altas said. "I believe that you see this girl's psi rating as a threat, and you intend to remove that threat."

Maria shook her head. "No. No, you are mistaken."

"Oh?" He stepped forward, an intimidating presence for a being so short as he was. "Then why did you come here alone?"

"I felt I could take care of the situation myself--"

"Indeed! You could kill her with no one the wiser!"

Maria was uncertain how to respond: she half wanted to reduce Altas to scattered particles and half wanted to break down and cry. Instead, she just stood there--

Until Delithita came flying down the corridor like a banshee, her face red with fury. "Altas!" she cried, shaking off Icey's hand as he tried to stop her and calm her. "She has saved all our lives so many times I can't even count! And you stand there and accuse her of murdering children?!"

"People change," Altas said coldly.

Del struck the wall, and this time more happened than the mere spraying of dust. An explosion of impressive proportions shook the corridor, and a huge slab of rock fell to the floor to smash into pieces.

"I'll prove she didn't do it!" Del cried, her arm embedded up to the elbow in the wall, glowing brightly enough to overpower the light tubes. "I'll take the lot of us back in time and show you!"

(MAR ^-/\t) + (DEL ⁺/\t) -> [0,1,9090]

"No, you can't do that..." Maria said softly, horrified. Time travel was dangerous enough, but it would be even worse if Del tried it when she was so angry--

I reverse change in time and Del produces change in time--

"Yes, I want to see," Altas said acidly. "Or are you hiding something?"

"That's enough!" Del cried. "I know she didn't, and I'll prove it!"

"Do it."

"No!" Maria cried, and gathered her powers around her. Del was making a terrible mistake--

(DEL 9090) + (ALT /\~ {MAR ^-/\t) -> /\t*9090

The universe was wrong.

Del. Altas. I must stop this, but I cannot!

The fabric of time rippled. Maria, Altas, Del, and Icey all screamed. Something else screamed with them: a number of somethings, crying out horribly.

Scream.

Maria screamed.

Screamscream.

Del and Icey screamed.

Four screams. Something was being ripped apart. Eight. Sixteen. Thirty-two.

Far away, Razorback and Xenogears awakened on the Mirror Dance, screaming.

Carrot and Ko'ah, chasing women on some Imperial planet, suddenly cried out and vanished from a crowded square in a blaze of light the planet would be talking about for months.

Eidolon, brooding over her wormhole at the Center, disappeared with a yelp.

Ghosts screamed.

Above it all, a little girl screamed. "Stop it. Stop it. Stop iiiiiiiit!"

@ (t_{ALT /\~}) && (t_{MAR /\t}) @@ d.ara -> d.ara // box

Dara stood in front of her open door, and battered at the four Ghosts with a disc of blackness that absorbed their light. Maria's gold, Del's red, Icey's blue, and Altas's green mixed into a mad spiral and spun through each other in midair. Winds buffeted them as the vortex began sucking air into itself. A moment later, the broken pieces of rock from the shattered wall flew through the air and were also sucked in.

"Close it!" Maria screamed, trying to be heard over the awful screams and roaring wind.

The vortex turned inside out, vomiting light and wind and shards of rock, then vanished.

The Ghosts fell back against the wall.

The child fell slowly to knees, battered and bloody from a hundred small cuts, the result of the flying rock shards.

Maria turned to her as she spoke in a tiny, choked voice. "Don't you like my squiggle pie?"

The child fainted.

Del caught her as she fell, and eased her to the ground. Quickly, the Ghost extended a trembling hand and a rose appeared there. The rose was black and dangerous-looking, but healthy. Del stared at it for a moment, then shook herself and dropped the rose on the girl's chest. "She's fine," Del said quietly. "God help us."

Icey took a deep breath, spoke in a wavering voice. "I don't like squiggle pie."

Maria only nodded, and hoped this mess had accomplished something. The Ghosts had almost done something terrible, and the child had stopped them. Perhaps now the ghost attacks would also stop.

-----

The next day, the report came in. A young musician in Fantasma had been found dead on Level Eight, with multiple lacerations and catastrophic chest trauma. Carved across his forehead in bloody slashes was the symbol for pi, with a tilde above it...

/ < / << /