From: mkkuhner@milton.u.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner)
Newsgroups: rec.games.frp
Subject: Story:  Jayhawk (144)
Date: 8 Apr 92 14:51:01 GMT
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle

144.  Beginnings

Jayhawk paced her workroom, staring at a construct of code like a silver
spider.  A friend had sent it to her for her opinion; she'd almost sent
it back with a snap judgement--trace-and-mark, good code but nothing all
that unusual--but something had nagged her about it.  It didn't access
the Overnet, not in any way that she knew.  But it accomplished effects
that should not have been possible without Overnet access.  And its
programming style struck her as distantly and dangerously familiar.

In the eighteen years she'd been keeper of the Overnet she'd seen
several attempts to revive the Paradisian Matrix-work.  They were
generally recognizable by their choice of symbols--Jaguar Knights and
Feathered Serpents, pyramids and obsidian knives--as well as by the
attempt to use Overnet constructions that predated the transformation of
the Overnet.  She'd watched them carefully, and in one case mentioned
them to Duende.  That installation had shortly ceased to exist.

She had also had vague hints of something far more subtle.  Sometimes
she felt that she was being opposed--or not even opposed, but competed
with--by someone else who could access the Overnet fully.  It was hard
to imagine how that could be.  But she kept seeing small signs, code
that shouldn't quite have been possible, paths of investigation blocked
off so cleverly she couldn't be sure they hadn't just petered out.

The spider had that touch to it, an easy, dangerous competance with
ideas that were just beginning to work their way into top-level Matrix
programming.

A bell chimed, warning her of email.  She compressed the construct into
an inert form, unwilling to allow it to act on Anubis while she was
distracted.  Sometimes she thought it might be *him*, gaming with her
across the great multi-level board of the Matrix and the Overnet.
Sometimes she was sure it was something new, an adversary crafted by the
world for her, as she had been for him.  In any case, she wasn't going
to take chances.

>Jayhawk,
>I would very much like to talk to you.  Can we get together?
>Martha

The address at the end was not the waterwheel station.  It was an
academic machine in Vancouver.

Jayhawk let out a whoop of delight and snapped off a reply:

>Sure!  Name the time and place.

The answer took a few minutes:

>Terrific!  How about the Crystal Palace, 17:20 PST?

She was there early, careful as always of traps.  Not many deckers knew
of her existance, but the ones who did--her students, some of them, and
her students' students--took her very seriously indeed.  It would not
have been the first time she'd walked into a web of code designed to put
her power at someone else's disposal.  It was almost a game, though it
would have become deadly earnest if any of them had ever succeeded.

The Crystal Palace was a stimsense image of a sumptuous restaurant, high
ceilings bedecked with crystal chandeliers, booths of Tiffany glass.  It
had become fashionable in recent years to replicate the material world
on the Matrix, down to drinks that could be tasted, and there were quite
a few deckers drinking and talking here.  Jayhawk walked veiled in her
cloak of bells, trying to avoid being recognized.  She spotted an
Interpol agent, sitting at the bar pretending to be engrossed in his
drink.  If he saw her there would be questions--not a problem for her,
but she didn't want to complicate Martha's life.  If it was Martha.

She'd been planning to hunt Martha down someday, but she'd been resolved
to wait until she was twenty-one.  That resolve seemed silly now.
Jayhawk had been an adult at eighteen, after all.

A tall, think girl was sitting alone in a side booth, chin resting on
hands, trying not to be too obtrusive as she watched the passers-by.
Jayhawk made her way over, slid in on the other side, taking off her 
cloak and spreading it across the side of the booth to give them both 
privacy.  The girl looked up, startled.  She appeared to be about
eighteen, full-grown but not filled out yet.  Hyper-realistic Matrix
images had been all the rage lately.  Jayhawk sent a query winging back
through Anubis to the Net, retrieved the name that went with that image.
Martha Ann Walker, of Vancouver.

"Jayhawk?" she said in a soft musical voice, somewhere between question
and recognition.

"Martha!  It's good to see you again."

"It's good to see you too!  What would you like to drink?"  Her words
came tumbling out.  "How have you been?"

"Tropical Teaser," said Jayhawk at random.  Supplied by the node's
programming, two drinks slid out onto their table from a hidden chute.
For a few months automated waiters had been the rage, until people
noticed that it was all too easy to substitute disguised deckers.
"Things are going pretty well for me.  Lots to do.  I can learn about
new stuff all day and all night and still not keep up with the current
research--it's really an explosion.  How about you?"

Martha looked up shyly.  Her eyes were not the brown Jayhawk remembered;
the expression was almost the same, but this girl had a kind of 
innocence to her, though not a childish one.  "I think I've been a
puzzle to my parents.  Too mature for my age, they always said.  They
blamed it on the Awakening, which is fair, I guess."  Very softly:  "You
know, it almost seemed like a dream, a dream I'd had all my life.  I
didn't know whether to believe you really existed, and then I got your
letter--"

"I really do," said Jayhawk with a delighted smile.  "God, I've missed
you!"

"I've missed you too."  She took a deep sip of the simulated drink.
"I've missed...a lot of things."  There was a hint of red on her high
cheekbones.  "What have you been doing all this time?"

"Keeping an eye on things.  Relearning the Overnet--it's changed quite a 
bit.  Dickering with the Turing Police.  We've been hashing out some legal
issues involving AI citizenship--I'm pretty proud of that.  Teaching...
sometimes that worked out, sometimes it didn't.  Do you remember the 
big panic in '57?"

"I remember hearing about it," said Martha with a trace of embarrasment.
"I wasn't very old then."

"That was a student of mine--and me, trying to catch him before he did
something worse.  I really misjudged him.  But on the whole, things have
been going really well."  She couldn't say how well without bragging.
"Yourself?"

"I've been thinking about the future a lot.  If you're real, that means
the rest of it....It's funny, thinking that in a couple of years...."

"Lots of time yet."  So Martha did know that she was to be *his* mother.
She wouldn't have wanted to break that news.

"That's right," said Martha defiantly, "and I'm going to use it, too.
I've gotten behind in a lot of things.  You weren't kidding about the
research explosion.  And when I *do* become a mother, well, he's going
to get more than he bargained for.  Going to raise him up right, I am.
Teach him a thing or two."

"I bet you will."  She could barely sit still, bubbling over with
excitement.  She'd missed Martha...more than she'd realized.  And the
idea of awakening to find your dreams a reality touched deep chords of
wonder in the part of her that was Angela.  "I don't know whether to
offer to teach you or ask to become your student.  There's so much--"

"Oh, I'm sure you have more to teach me--you've been out there for
eighteen years, after all.  *I've* been stuck in school!  But I'm free
and clear now."  With sudden shyness, "I would like that.  I might be
able to show you a few tricks too."

"I've been visiting, um, the other Martha, at the waterwheel--about once
a month, usually.  We have tea and pull weeds."

Martha glanced down.  "I'm glad to hear that.  Is she doing all right?"

"I think so.  She wonders why you chose as you did."

"I felt that I'd missed out on a lot of things, and I wanted to give
them a try.  A new beginning, maybe."

The idea of Martha's mortality caught Jayhawk suddenly and painfully.
Only a few decades, a century at most....It was a high price to pay even
for rebirth.  But that was Martha's choice, not hers.  And perhaps it
wouldn't come to that.  The dizzing whirl of science might save her.
*He* might.  "She'd like to hear that from you, I think."

"I'll tell her," said Martha, and then in a much smaller voice,
"...someday.  I have a lot to learn, or relearn.  I'm getting the
impression that some of the rules have changed."

"Fair's fair!" said Jayhawk, laughing.  "You guys always changed the
rules on me.  Tell me one thing--I've never been able to get *her* to
explain--How could Paradisio get started so long before the Awakening?"

"What do you think the Awakening was?"

"Magic came back, or at least became a lot more accessable...."

"The Awakening happened," Martha said seriously, "when people realized
that they weren't the only ones out there.  That's it.  It didn't happen
all at once, or at the same rate everywhere.  I was taught in school
that the Awakening began in 2040.  But I died in 2023."  She laughed
suddenly.  "Not that that explains all of the dates, does it?  But some
of them...just got confused.  If you live for thirty years,
subjectively, does it matter that only ten passed on the calendar?  Some
of them decided that it didn't.  Or they may not even have known
anymore."

Jayhawk nodded.  "It's not over yet, is it?  Channa tells me that one of
her students is a mageborn decker, and as far as she can tell he's doing
okay.  The rules keep changing."

"It's not over yet," said Martha, and drained the last of her drink.
"Though it almost was--for us, anyway...."

Jayhawk held out her hand, said with an impish smile, "So!  When I teach
people, I usually start out by trying to find out what they already
know.  Want to go for a jog?"

"I'd love to," said Martha with a smile that made her shiver, and took
her hand.

--

The End

--

Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner
Newsgroups: rec.games.frp