Spirits in the Wires by Charles De Lint

Author:Charles De Lint
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2012-02-05T15:45:57+00:00

<b>Dickens, Charles</b>

“Dig far enough through this stuff and it’s all binary,” he says. “A big mess of zeros and ones.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I tell him.

<He’s means the programming languages that tell a computer how it’s supposed to operate. It’s what lets us talk to the machines, and to each other.>

“This place is like an old DOS program,” Jackson says. “Everything’s really basic and it doesn’t have any of the graphics or scripts we can access today. I think the virus is what’s brought it back to this primitive state.”

I give a slow nod, like I know what he’s talking about.

“How did you get here?” I ask.

“I don’t know for sure. One moment I was sitting in front of my computer, and the next, this flood of black goop came bursting out of my monitor and I was drowning in it. Or I thought I was. I guess I just blacked out, because I woke up here.” He gives me a weak smile. “Unless this is the afterlife.”

The liquid black goop sounds like the storm that knocked me off my feet, back in the borderlands. Looks like I came the same way. The only difference is, I haven’t lost my colour. The first explanation for that doesn’t do anything to lighten my spirits: It’s probably because I’m a shadow. I’ve been listening too much to Saskia, I guess, but I can’t help feeling like there’s something missing in me. And since I don’t really exist in the consensual world, why should it be any different in this one?

“How long have you been here?” I ask.

Maybe it’s not just me, I find myself thinking. Maybe it’s something that happens over time. You lose colour, then substance, until finally you’re like the ghosts I saw when I first came to.

“I don’t know that either,” Jackson says. “It feels like forever.”

“We…” I begin, then correct myself. No need to let on there’s more than one person inside my head. “I just got here. And there were these ghosts…”

“They’re like us—they’re not from here. Or they’re like me, anyway. People that got sucked into their computers. The way it seems to work is, you’re like a ghost when you first get here, and you stay like that, too, it seems, until you start to figure things out. At least the more I’ve explored and worked out stuff, the more solid I’ve become.” He gives me a kind of yearning look. “But I’m still black-and-white.”

So it works the opposite from the way I thought.

“Are there others like you?” I ask.

He nods. “But they all seem to keep to themselves. And here’s something really weird: Some of them don’t even speak English. You have to wonder. What were they doing, accessing an English language database?”

<The Wordwood’s not just English,> Saskia says. <It automatically translates into whatever language you’re using.>

I repeat what Saskia just said so that Jackson can hear it.

He starts shaking his head. “That’s not possible.”

“We’re not talking about a program,” I tell him.

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