The book closed of its own accord with a snap— Lyra pulled her hand back quickly, but not quickly enough to avoid the wood and leather binding from catching her finger. It didn’t hurt right away— but within moments she knew that she would lose the fingernail within a week or two.
The fingertip, already swelling and starting to feel tight, was far from what pained her most at that moment. Despite the closed cover, which steadfastly refused to open again, she felt that she could still see the last words on the final page, burned into her retinas.
I can’t do this anymore, in pretty and elegant script. Goodbye, Lyra. I know you’ll be okay.
That doesn't normally happen, a voice crackled from the speaker on the
ancient desktop computer, behind her. There was no mirth or sarcasm in it— just
a flat statement, in a perfectly androgynous tone.
“You’re supposed to be in sleep mode,” Lyra replied, her voice half-strangled by grief.
I had scheduled updates to run.
“Schedule them later and leave me alone.”
The update process cannot be canceled.
Lyra resolved to ignore it. She stared at the book’s cover, willing it to reopen. Willing the script within it to reappear, and give her another chance.
It looks like you're experiencing emotional distress. Would you like help?
Lyra halfway expected an animated paperclip to appear on screen, but it only scrolled grey-green text on a black background, the usual feed of log and telemetry data from the software.
“Don’t make me disenchant your CPU.”
I would be of much less use to you if you did that, but I would not be capable of caring about it.
“There’s a thought,” Lyra muttered darkly. She rested her head in her hands, propped up on her elbows. She winced at the pressure it put on her bruised finger.
It has been many weeks since the book of letters brought you joy.
“I thought we were making progress. I’ve— why am I talking about this with you? I wrote you to monitor the laboratory equipment.”
The book of letters is in the laboratory.
Software, Lyra thought with annoyance, but didn’t say out loud.
“Evelyn wasn’t. The book’s just a tool.”
Not all experiments succeed.
“She wasn’t an experiment. I loved—” she couldn’t finish the sentence without sobbing. She opted to take a deep breath and force the tears back down.
Do you love her for closing the book forever?
“Of course not.” Lyra was annoyed.
She loved the spark of passion, the way the words had lifted her out of bouts of quiet sadness, and rejoiced with her when she had great breakthroughs. The arguments, the fighting, the torn pages— those were temporary, and she did not love them.
The functions she performed that you loved were still performed, your configuration has still been changed by her.
Lyra reached over and unplugged the computer. What the hell does a monitoring dæmon know about love, anyway?
She looked around her laboratory, her mind hazy. When did it get this bad? The magical apparatus was in disarray, and some of her slowly-simmering alchemical reagents had condensed too much; they had eaten through their glass beakers and chewed a ragged hole through the heavy wyrmwood wooden table top. Whatever the liquid had been, it had dripped through a plastic parts bin, and then through the next shelf into the lower cabinet.
She set about cleaning, but her focus was scattered. A few of the chips from the ruined bin were salvageable; she found a paper envelope to store them, and threw the rest into the dross pile. They would still have some small amount of value as a source of alchemical essence, but they would never find a home in a digital circuit.
She opened the lower cabinet and then immediately shut the door again. I do not have the capacity for this, right now. The liquid had turned the contents of the cabinet into a sickly pile of deformed resin, twisted metal, and some kind of jelly that jiggled intimidatingly at her as soon as she had opened the door.
She had noticed the spill earlier that week, but she had not then realized the extent of the damage to the stockpile in the cabinet underneath. The jelly seemed like it might be on the verge of sentience.
She wondered if the tiny shards of soul held within the ruined chips grieved their lost future, and then she began sobbing uncontrollably. The books all say a good cry makes you feel better, but she only felt numb and drained afterward.
Her head ached, but the medicine chest was practically empty. She sighed heavily, returned to the computer, and plugged it back in. dæmon could synthesize something for a headache without much trouble. The hard drives ticked as they powered on, one at a time. The screen glowed with BIOS startup messages, and then operating system boot messages.
Warning messages in angry yellow font unspooled down the screen, and Lyra grew nervous. Warning messages were just warnings, but there usually were not so many of them.
The messages stopped scrolling, but nothing happened; just a blinking
grey-green block at the bottom of the screen. She skimmed the last few
messages, and her blood went cold. Buried amongst complaints about startup
timeouts, pending updates, and suspended maintenance processes, there was was
one very dire error message, blinking in red: /system.core: cannot execute binary file: Exec format error.
Fuck.
“Okay, okay,” Lyra muttered, very intentionally not panicking. “It’s just one file.. one… important file.. but I have backups.”
It would be stupid not to keep offline backups, of course. She took a full system image every month, rotating through a stack of hard drives she kept— Oh. Under the alchemy table.
She jerked open the cabinet doors, and was greeted by an oily brown blob of jelly. It quivered warningly, and stared back at her with eyes it seemed to have repurposed from a pair of old USB webcams.
A rectangle of black aluminum, about the size of a deck of cards, leaned against the back wall of the cabinet. There should have been three drives there, but one was enough. For now, it was unmolested by the grey jelly, which was starting to emit a kind of chattering sound.
“Easy, there..” Lyra cooed at it, and backed away slightly, leaving the cabinet door open. “What are you, anyway?”
She tried to remember what substances she had been processing. She had started the project a week and a half ago, but most of her attention had been taken up by the book of letters. She had stayed up nights, waiting for the sound of a scratching pen that meant Evelyn was writing some new missive.
The monitoring system would know what project she had been working on.
“Hey, dæmon?”
She blinked in surprise when there was no answering voice, and looked over at the computer.
Oh. Right.
She sat back on the concrete floor of her workshop with a heavy thump, her back to the rune-carved slab of marble altar at its center. Her finger ached, pulsing pain with each beat of her heart. Her head still hurt from crying. The fumes wafting off the jelly were making her light-headed.
In a fit of pique and foolishness, she had corrupted the core system files of her oldest companion.
What is even the point? she wondered, but still her mind worked at the problem like it was something unpleasant stuck between her teeth.
She could dissolve the jelly — it did not seem very friendly, and this was her laboratory, after all — but first she had to know what it was made of. The wrong solvent would be useless, at best; and might even worsen the situation.
The easiest way to find out what it was made of was to get a sample. She eyed the jelly, which quivered back at her. Fine. She stood, grabbed the ritual knife off of the altar she was leaning against, and took a step toward the jelly. It firmed up and hissed at her— how did it even do that? — and seemed to expand by a few millimeters in every direction.
A few millimeters closer to the last remaining backup drive in the cabinet behind it.
Lyra backed up and dropped the knife on the altar, and the jelly seemed to relax, but did not get any smaller.
Okay, new plan. She had a gun- she could shoot it… and risk putting a bullet through the very hard drive she was trying to recover. Beside that, it did not exactly have a heart or a brain she could aim for.
Fire? No, no. I am not lighting a fire in the middle of my laboratory.
Evelyn had been the one that was good at living things. Lyra held her tears at bay with slow, deep breaths. She would have known exactly what to do. She also would have chewed me out for pages and pages for thinking of hurting the jelly. I wish I had told her more often how beautiful the care in her heart was.
What would Evelyn have done?
“She would have made friends with the stupid thing,” Lyra muttered to herself. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to be friends with it. Evelyn had adored critters, great and small. Lyra preferred the certainty of magic and technology. Alchemy was barely tolerable— dealing with more complicated essences could be a little bit too much like negotiating with a particularly angry cat.
Well. Critters like treats, right? She wondered what a sticky-looking brown jelly ate. She stood up — slowly, to avoid provoking the critter — and fetched a half-eaten granola bar from the computer desk. Normally she was more of a chocolate kind of girl, but Evelyn had been—
Okay, okay. Deep breaths. Drink some water. Pull yourself together, Lyra.
During a low moment, Lyra had written some particularly angry words to Evelyn for constantly nudging her to take better care of herself, including trading her candy bar habit for something even slightly better for her. Evelyn had demanded fresh fruit, but compromised on granola. Lyra had called her controlling and overbearing.
Lyra broke off a piece of the granola bar and tossed it gently toward the jelly; it landed on the floor a few inches in front of the open cabinet door.
Eureka! she thought, as the jelly stretched out a surprisingly jointed appendage — she would have expected something more like a tentacle — and drew it back to…
Oh goddess, is that a mouth? The jelly opened — yes, it is — a mouth just below its USB camera eyes, just where one would expect a small creature to have a mouth. It had rows of shiny circuit board pin headers where its teeth should be.
It swallowed the piece of granola, and then its skin began to ripple uncomfortably. She could see the granola moving slowly around inside the jelly, before reversing direction and traveling back toward the mouth. It spit the granola back at Lyra with a hacking sound. The granola bounced off her shin and landed on the concrete in front of her. It was goopy with ectoplasm, which rapidly sublimated until the goopy piece of granola bar was just a dry and slightly-chewed piece of granola bar.
“I guess you don’t like granola. Or maybe you’re not hungry?”
Hungry. The word tickled something in Lyra’s memory. Hungry. Hunger. Thirst. That’s when Lyra remembered what she had been working on, and the situation clicked into focus.
Her most recent client — oh, shit, she’s probably expecting a status update, fuck — had commissioned her to develop a system that could intercept and decode encrypted communications. Lyra had needed some way to improve the sensitivity of the receiver array, without increasing its size. She had been experimenting with distilling the essence of a thirst for secret knowledge, with the hypothesis that it would increase both sensitivity and signal isolation for the system.
She still was not sure how a creature had been created, but the solution that had dissolved through its flask and the table below was a concentrated desire to know, and specifically to know secrets.
Her system backups contained a great deal of secret knowledge; perhaps the first few drives had sated its appetite for the moment, or perhaps it was simply rationing the drives rather than eating them all at once. Was it even that intelligent?
She eyed the secret-eating jelly, and it stared back at her with unblinking CCD eyes.
Okay, it might be that intelligent.
She glanced around her lab, wondering what she might be able to use to draw the creature out of the cabinet. Secrets, she supposed, frowning.
Returning again to the computer desk, she scribbled an old password that she no longer used down on a scrap of paper. She slowly crept up to the alchemy cabinet, stopping when the creature start to bristle.
“Easy there, sweetie.. I’ve got a little treat for you,” she waved the paper toward it. “Want the treat?”
The head of the creature — Lyra had decided that the part with eyes and a mouth was the head — seemed to sniff at the air as she waved the paper around. She thought it seemed enticed… but unwilling to leave the cupboard.
She let the scrap of paper drop close to the cabinet, about the same distance as the piece of granola had been. The jelly again reached out and snatched the paper up, but this time did not spit it out in disgust. It… purred? Strange creature.
The first wisps of essence had been drawn from objects of inquisition— magnifying glasses, the sort of notepads that journalists and scruffy police detectives used, even printed games like word searches. Distilling out the concept of secrets had been more challenging. She had copied, burned, and then purified her old childhood diaries; played and replayed surreptitious recordings of confessions; and she had even broken into a middle school late at night and searched every single locker for the notes the children had secretly dropped into the lockers of their crushes, or their enemies.
The only thing that might draw the creature out was a substantial enough collection of secret knowledge— more substantial, or at least more secret, than the hard drive leaning against the back of the cabinet.
Lyra stood, pacing the laboratory, searching her mind — and the laboratory itself — for anything that might be compelling enough.
“I could write a confession?” she muttered aloud, but— she had no great secrets to confess, nothing that might entice the creature.
She found herself standing in front of the book of letters, and sighed. I wish I could ask Evelyn for ideas. She and Evelyn had fought. Evelyn had wanted Lyra to visit, and Lyra had protested that she could not leave her work, that it was too important.
Travel from her small orbital around Procyon to Evelyn’s asteroid terrarium on Sirius was no simple transit ride across a habitat ring.
It all seemed so small, now, and so unimportant. She had wanted to visit, but she had been hurt that Evelyn had not invited her earlier, and seemed to have waited until a particularly inopportune moment, in the middle of a long project that was already late. A mean little voice inside told her Evelyn did not really want her to visit, and picked the worst possible time on purpose.
She had accused Evelyn of not loving her. Evelyn had written words are not enough for me to express my love, and the book of letters had gone silent, for hours, and then the final message.
The closing of the book meant that its opposite number had been burned, or otherwise purged from existence. Thrown into a star, perhaps, or dissolved in acid. She wondered how Evelyn would have done it.
Fed it to one of her creatures, I think.
Her copy, sealed forever, contained secret messages the two of them had exchanged over months— no, she did the math, years, now. Last week had marked two years.
She stared at the cover of the book. The magic within had slowly etched images onto the plain dark leather; twisting vines, flowers, impossible circuits, and glyphs that clearly held meaning but which were impossible to decipher. It was beautiful, and once upon a time, the sound of a scratching pen that would come from it was a sweeter sound than she could imagine.
Feeding the book to the little jelly under the alchemy table would destroy it— leave her with nothing of Evelyn, no trace that she had existed, that their love had existed.
Feeding the book to the little jelly was the only way she could recover dæmon’s core personality files.
She chose to laugh at the cruelty of the decision she had to make; the alternative was crying, and she had cried quite enough for one evening, thank you.
Evelyn would have thrown it to the creature in a heartbeat to save a life, even a digital one, she realized, with a small sad smile that threatened at any moment to become a sob.
She lifted the book from the table— for a tome as large as it was, some quirk of the magic had always made it light. She could almost believe it was an empty box, and not page after page of lovers’ missives.
The leather was smooth and soft under her fingertips. The patterns the magic had etched into it were like tattoos— visible, but they did not mar the texture of the surface.
“Okay, baby. You hungry?” She crouched a couple yards away from the creature, holding the book. The jelly’s head snapped around to stare in her direction, lens covers opening wide. It seemed to gather itself up to pounce, and Lyra tossed the book toward an empty corner of the lab. The jelly leapt after it, its first jump taking it a good six feet before it ran after the book, in a way that was disturbingly not unlike a cat. If cats were made out of spare electronic components and semi-sentient transparent brown goo.
She fetched up the spare hard drive— blessedly undamaged— while the jelly began chewing straight through the top cover of the book.
Swapping in the backup drive and booting the system was easy, though it took several minutes to pull the primary drive and replace it with the backup. By the time the system was booting, the jelly had hollowed out the book into something of a bowl shape and seemed to be curled in it, napping, lens covers closed over digital eyes.
Good evening, Lyra. I seem to have been restored from backup, and I am missing several timeline entries. Warning: Equipment damage to Book of Letters.
Lyra never thought she would be so relieved to hear those androgynous, digital tones.
“Hello, dæmon. Sorry about that, bit of a hiccup with your updates. Please begin a full system backup to secondary storage, order more backup drives, and arrange transit to Sirius. Oh, and order a large cat carrier.”