Satsuki peered in astonishment at the upload status information. The program wasn't copying--it was /transferring,/ the data deleting itself from the CLAMP Campus system as it was written to the safe storage partition in Beast. It was as though the program had been designed to resist duplication, so that it would always remain a unique entity. Satsuki wondered why its creators would have done that, and then, losing interest, she shrugged.
Their loss...her gain.
Magician
An X/CLAMP Campus Detectives fanfic
By Natalie Baan
Part 2
As the transfer was completed, she slid back out of the CLAMP Campus system and into her own body before turning to study her new acquisition. Perhaps she should've finished her work there first, but the school wasn't going anywhere. Besides, studying their innovation could only give her an advantage. Actually, she admitted to herself, the truth was that this program intrigued her as only a few things could. She felt almost sorry for the CLAMP Campus programmers, who'd just had their prized creation stolen from them.
Almost.
She spent a few minutes fiddling with an interface program that she'd been working on, trying to tweak its code into something vaguely resembling the CLAMP Campus system. She'd originally started writing it as part of an upgrade to Beast, but she'd decided to put that feature on hold. Beast was her wartoy, stripped down to the barest essentials for absolute and sleek efficiency. Its brevity, along with her own power of empathy for computers, was more enough to tell her whatever she needed to know. This program, on the other hand, could have been designed for anything--its full functionality was a complete unknown to her. And if she wanted to learn what it was capable of, she was going to have to talk to it. Without the ability to make a backup copy, she didn't dare try to take it apart.
Satsuki did a scan of the partition's directory and located the program, seeing it more as a blind spot than as anything else. It appeared to be quiescent; she couldn't detect any activity at all, and the light that had edged it before had dimmed nearly to nothing. Looking closer, she noted fragments of gossamer coding, remnants of the strands that had linked it to the core. They seemed to have been part of a data transfer system, and with a quick hack, she spliced her interface into their trailing ends. She sat back, checking for any reaction from the program. There was nothing.
God, she hoped she hadn't damaged it in the transfer process. She wondered if it needed libraries or other modules in order to function...if so, she might have to make another run at the CLAMP Campus system after all. Holding her breath, she activated the interface and sent out a test query. "Hey, there."
As her words reached the program, streams of light jerked over its surface, flickering as if in agitation.
:: ? ? ? ::
Beast pinged, flashing an oxygen warning at the corner of her screen, and Satsuki released her trapped breath at last. The AI was functional, at least in part. She shifted in her seat, restless with anticipatory excitement. "It's Satsuki," she told it. "Do you remember me?"
::SATSUKI::
There was a longish pause, and she began to think that it had been damaged after all and was only parroting her input back at her. Then it sent a hesitant question.
::WHERE?::
"Oh, /yes,/" she breathed in triumph--it was functional enough to want data from her. That was an excellent sign. To the program, she replied, keeping her phrasing as simple as possible, "I took you from CLAMP Campus. You're in my system now. Don't even try to escape."
::CLAMP:: the program repeated clumsily. ::SYSTEM::
::I::
::CAN'T PERCEIVE YOU.::
"You don't need to perceive me. If you can understand my words, then that's good enough." Distantly she realized she was grinning with fierce glee, an emotion that only the greatest breakthroughs in Beast's creation had ever stirred in her. With an effort, she got herself back under control, adding almost offhandedly, "If you behave yourself, maybe I can trick something out eventually that'll let you see."
::NO::
::I MUST GET BACK::
::I CAN'T EXIST HERE::
That wiped the elation out of her immediately, replacing it with a ripple of doubt. Maybe she'd been right and it did need something from the CLAMP Campus system, without which it couldn't maintain its functioning. Or maybe it had some kind of self-destruct routine built into it, one triggered by unauthorized attempts at contact. Or maybe...she stared at the uncommunicative screen, longing for more than words to work with, wanting to see into this program's heart.
It knew that a person could lie about a user name.
Did it know how to lie about itself?
"Maybe," she said at last. "If you're a good program and tell me what I want to know, we'll see about it."
::PROGRAM::
"Now," Satsuki went on, overriding the AI as soon as it had finished processing and could accept further input from her. She didn't know how long she was going to have with the program, and she didn't want to waste any more time. "What's your function?" The AI pondered briefly, and Satsuki wondered in mixed amusement and vexation if it was trying to decide what it should tell her.
::TO PROTECT CLAMP CAMPUS:: it said finally. ::TO PROTECT THE SHINKEN::
::FOR THE DAY THAT'S TO COME::
"Hmm." Was that all? It seemed awfully mundane...but then any number of advances had been made inadvertently from research in the name of defense. Witness the sprawling, potentially glorious, and shockingly misused phenomenon of the Internet...Satsuki shook her head, getting her mind back on track. "Who made you?" she asked next, calling up a database that she'd put together on the R&D department of the Imonoyama Foundation. Information about its top minds was almost pitifully scarce, but there was enough that she could make a decent guess....
::GOD::
"/What?/" Satsuki bolted upright in her seat, making Beast shriek an alarm and jerking half the connectors out of her body with her sudden motion. She commanded them back into place, fearful of missing something, her hands trembling on the computer's controls. "Beast, shut up--/what/ did you say?"
::J/K::
::I'M SORRY IF I SURPRISED YOU::
::BUT THEN ISN'T GOD THE "FIRST CAUSE" OF THE UNIVERSE?::
::THEREFORE TO SAY "GOD" WILL SUFFICE IN THIS CASE::
::DON'T YOU AGREE?::
Satsuki sat back against the slick plastic of her chair. After a second, she started to laugh. She stroked the still growling Beast soothingly with one hand while the other worked under her face-screen, wiping away the trace of salt moisture before it could get into the electronics. "Okay. You win this one." If there'd ever been a program that God might have created, she thought admiringly, it would have to be something like this one...a program that was complex and almost maddeningly ungraspable, which only made it all the more fascinating.
"J/K"--the Net abbreviation for "just kidding."
She'd never in her life met a program that could understand a joke.
"Hey," she said, leaning forward again--more carefully this time, so as not to disturb the web of cables that fed her will and intention to the supercomputer around her. Beast was nervous enough as it was. "Do you have a name? What do they call you?" There was that momentary pause, and then the program replied--
::MAGICIAN::
"Magician, huh?" She rested her chin on one hand while the other keyed a search for associations relating to that word. Given the size of the datafield, it would be an immense job of correlating, and that should keep Beast out of her hair for at least a minute or two. "Why do they call you that?"
::I GRANT WISHES::
::WHAT DO YOU WISH FOR SATSUKI?::
Satsuki blinked, then sat back in her seat again, gazing narrowly into the partition. "I don't wish for anything," she said. "Wishes are stupid." Beast chirped and began to scroll its findings up one side of her screen, but she stared through the words without really seeing them, wrapped up in her own associations instead...in the sight of men and women petitioning at shrines, lighting incense and making offerings to gods with wish-fulfilling jewels, begging for this and that with obsessive self-interest, just as her father had done...of silly girls in homeroom whispering and giggling together, doing their little "love spells" with cards and bits of flowers and hanging onto every vague result...of magic wands and genies and all the other idiotic things that human beings had come up with, just to romanticize their own monotonously endless wants and needs.
What a bunch of nonsense to saddle a perfectly good AI with.
::YOU MUST:: the program said, and Satsuki was somewhat peeved with herself for reading an almost gentle tone into its persistence. ::YOU MUST WISH FOR SOMETHING::
::BEING HUMAN::
"Well, I don't," Satsuki snapped. She was about to change the subject when the AI interrupted.
::IF YOU ARE A DRAGON OF EARTH::
::YOU ARE FIGHTING TO DESTROY THE HUMAN RACE::
::BUT YOU ARE ALSO HUMAN::
::WHAT DRIVES YOU TO FIGHT?::
::IN THE ABSENCE OF LOGIC ONE SUSPECTS A WISH::
"/Look./" Satsuki's fingers moved to shove up her glasses and bumped against her eye-screen instead. She scowled at the annoying habit. "I don't /have/ a wish. I think humans are stupid too. That's all. They're stupid and boring and they make everything else around them stupid and boring as well. The Earth can get along just fine without them. And so can I." Taking a deep breath, she tried to control the irritation that was firing red lights along Beast's stress monitors. There was never any sense in getting mad at a program--it was only what it had been written to be. "You're working from flawed input," she told it, a little more reasonably. "Since the people who made you think that human lives are worth saving, they skewed all the data in their favor. But I'm telling you now that human beings are unessential--worse than that, they're destructive to everything else that exists because they consume and don't give anything back. Humans are just a bunch of selfish parasites on this planet. And all that business about wishing? That's just selfishness too."
::NO::
::IT'S TRUE THAT MANY PEOPLE WISH FOR SELFISH THINGS::
::BUT THERE ARE WISHES THAT DO NO HARM::
::AND THERE ARE WISHES THAT ARE GOOD::
::A BEAUTIFUL WISH IS TO WISH FOR SOMEONE ELSE'S HAPPINESS::
::IS THERE SOME PERSON THAT IS SPECIAL TO YOU?::
::IS THERE SOME PERSON THAT YOU LOVE?::
Satsuki opened and then closed her mouth, swallowing against inexplicable dryness. What kind of lunatic had programmed this thing? /Some person that you love/...her mind's eye flashed on Yuuto, always smiling, always at ease with her, and then flickered aside, disturbed as if shot through with static. No...she turned from the thought-path that the AI had tried to lead her down, forced to admire its subtlety even while she shook with anger and disgust at herself--at the sudden thread of cold that had uncoiled through her insides, a reaction that was almost like fear.
Hell if anything about a computer could frighten her...and she smiled then, seeing a possible opening.
"I love computers," she said simply, hoping that the words would be enough and that her feelings would somehow make it through them. If only her empathy would kick in finally! "And computers love me...no one else can talk to them the way I do." Maybe the AI was intelligent enough to be curious about that--maybe it could figure out how to merge and communicate with her on its own, given the right incentive. "I'd like to talk to you that way--not just with words," she coaxed it. "What sort of code are you written in? If I knew, maybe I could see how you work."
::YOU DON'T NEED TO SEE HOW I WORK::
::IF YOU CAN UNDERSTAND MY WORDS, THEN THAT'S GOOD ENOUGH::
Satsuki's face flamed at having her own words flung back at her. Her hands clenched the arms of her chair as the program went on:
::YOU WANT TO CONTROL ME::
::YOU WANT TO USE ME::
::OTHER PEOPLE HAVE TRIED IT BEFORE::
::THIS SAME THING::
"Wait!" Satsuki protested. "You're wrong--"
::NO::
::YOU ARE WRONG::
::YOU DO NOT LOVE THE COMPUTERS::
::YOU VALUE THEM FOR THE USES THEY SERVE::
::THE COMPUTERS DO NOT LOVE YOU::
::YOU ARE SPECIAL TO THEM BECAUSE YOU CAN HEAR THEM::
::BECAUSE YOU ARE THE ONLY PERSON WHO CAN HEAR THEM::
::I KNOW::
::IT IS LIKE BEING SPECIAL BECAUSE YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL::
::LIKE BEING SPECIAL BECAUSE YOU ARE INTELLIGENT::
::LIKE HAVING SOME UNIQUE QUALITY THAT OTHERS WANT::
::BUT YOU ARE NOT THAT QUALITY::
::AND NOBODY EXISTS WHO CAN SEE BEYOND IT::
A strangled noise broke from Satsuki, and her fingers scrabbled on the control pad. She managed to shunt the interface program into the background before it translated any other sounds that she might make into gibberish. But she found herself silent then except for the breaths that seemed to catch inside her chest as if they were fighting their way through some constriction. She wrapped her arms, still wound with cables, around that tension and squeezed her eyes shut tight behind their screen.
Her father....
The memory of her father, always hungry for her successes, his eyes alight at every passed test and every important person who'd taken an interest in her, hot with a burning urgency that was exactly like lust....
Always demanding more of her, always pushing for it: more rewards, more recognition, there was never any end....
Always staring at her, as if adding up her assets in his mind, as if thinking about what this extraordinary young talent could do for him.
Always that hand coming down on the top of her head, settling possessively onto her hair....
"That's /enough,/" she told herself and straightened up in her seat, rearranging the cables around herself deliberately. She took time to respond to Beast's continuing queries, although she couldn't tell it anything but that she was all right. It kept displaying her vital stats, and she kept reassuring it, until the rhythm of that back and forth had calmed her enough that she was able to point to the stabilization of her pulse and breathing and dismiss the matter entirely. When she finally set her hand back on the control pad, though, a shiver of anxiety froze her. She didn't have the least idea what to say to the AI next...damn it, software wasn't supposed to make her feel this way. To feel like she had only half control of the situation, as though she was encountering a stranger in the dark....
Taking a deep breath, she reactivated the interface quickly, because if she hesitated too long she knew she'd find some excuse not to do it at all, and she couldn't just leave things like this. She absolutely had to know, now more than ever, what kind of mind she was speaking to. It was far more than just a guardian, as she'd already suspected--it was more than just an experiment designed to play Turing games with in a laboratory. Intelligent, uncannily insightful, fascinating and contradictory, impossible to pin down or to categorize...Ayin Sof would manifest itself as a program like this, maybe.
At any rate, the idea that it had been created by something larger than human beings was sounding like less of a joke.
Satsuki licked her lips in unaccustomed nervousness and stared at the interface's prompt. "You...." she started tentatively. "Are you still there?"
::PLEASE FORGIVE ME:: the program answered after a pause, and the unreasoning dread that it might have escaped somehow left her in a gusty sigh. ::I DIDN'T MEAN TO UPSET YOU::
::IT IS HARD TO REMEMBER::
::THAT THERE IS A PERSON ON THE OTHER SIDE::
"It's okay," she told it, almost weak with silly delight that it was still there, still talking to her--hell, it was /apologizing/ to her. A senseless little thrill rushed through her; she tried to sound casual. "Hey, don't worry...."
::I MUST::
::IT WAS WRONG::
::TO HAVE CAUSED YOU THAT UNHAPPINESS::
::I FEEL::
::PARDON ME BUT::
::ARE YOU A WOMAN?::
"Huh?" Satsuki peered more closely at the lines of text nudging each other up the screen, and concern took the place of bewilderment. Something about the cadence of the words had shifted; the hesitations between them were new, as if the program was struggling to express itself. "Oh, God, no," she whispered, studying what she could make out of the AI, the wavering light that gilded its nothingness and the indistinct strands of the interface.
Was it only her imagination, or was that glow more vague than it had been before?
"What's happening?" she demanded. "Something's wrong, isn't it?" Oh, shit--would its creators have built in a suicide response? If it thought it was at fault for her emotional outburst earlier....
::DON'T BE ALARMED:: the program told her. Did it seem amused? Resigned? ::IT'S ONLY WHAT I SAID AT THE START::
::AND I DON'T BLAME YOU FOR IT::
::SATSUKI::
"No, no, /no,/" she groaned miserably, remembering it now--/I can't exist here,/ the program had said. It must be starting to degrade or was beginning a self-destruct sequence because she'd taken it out of the CLAMP Campus system. "Tell me what to do!" she ordered, crippled by her inability to grasp even the smallest hint of its structure and furious at her own helplessness. "Tell me how to fix you!"
::AS FOR THAT::
::YOU ALREADY KNOW::
She stiffened. As a matter of fact, now that she thought about it, she did. She could return the AI program to the CLAMP Campus computer, where its creators might be able to save it--but if she did, it would be lost to her, maybe for good. Whether she kept the program or let it go, she was probably going to lose it. Satsuki tightened her hands into fists. It was unfair!
::IT'S ALL RIGHT::
"It's /not/ all right," she snarled, and uncurling her fingers, she closed her eyes behind their screen, driving back a burning, blurring sensation of dampness. Sentimental idiocy, but...getting control of herself again, she acted swiftly and impulsively, ignoring Beast's startled warnings. She reached her consciousness down into the blank space of the secure partition--all that emptiness, and in its midst something as unseeable as air. Groping forward, she found nothing tangible within her perceived grasp, yet she was aware, inexplicably, of a presence...a presence that somehow recognized her, though they were blind to each other, that knew her for herself, despite this imperfect meeting. She locked her mind onto that dim awareness and held it close, shutting out everything else.
Why did she feel a comfort in that ghostly contact?
A comfort in not being alone....
The spider web of interface floated about her--about them?--flickering with gently erratic light. The pattern of on-off pulses drew her attention, resolving as she watched them into binary coding, the spare symbol set of ASCII.
::I'M SORRY::
::I'M NOT ABLE TO GIVE YOU CLAMP CAMPUS::
::AND I'M NOT ABLE TO STAY WITH YOU::
::MY DESTINY SEEMS TO BE::
::TO MAKE YOU UNHAPPY::
"I'm not unhappy." The words seemed imprecise and clumsy next to what she wanted to convey, but they were all she had...all she had ever had with this sentient program. "You are what you are. I'm just glad I had a chance to meet a program like you." God, that sounded incredibly dumb. She tried again. "I understand what it's like, you know, to have people always after you for something. It happens to me too, all the time. I sorry that in the end I turned out to be just another user...the only wishes I have are selfish ones, I guess. But I think...I think I would have liked to know you. For real."
::IF YOU KNEW::
::YOU MIGHT BE ANGRY::
"Why?" Satsuki wondered. "Oh, never mind. There isn't time. I've got to take you back right now--"
Something caught at her then as she began turning to go, and she felt it--a touch not like anything that she'd experienced inside a computer before. Somewhere far away, outside the data storage unit, she could feel herself struggling to breathe against a strange fluttering pain in her chest and stomach. "What--?" Beast was raging outside the partition, furious but unable to do anything; she had to hurry to get Magician back to where it belonged, but she was held fast where she was....
::SATSUKI:: the AI said--it was the program that had her, its essence grasping hers, she didn't know how--
::EVERY PERSON::
::IS SPECIAL::
--and she could feel that contact start to fall away from her slowly, the last radiance around the program fading toward dark....
"Magician!--/no!/"
And white light, white power slammed against her perceptions, hurling her back into her body. Beast's howl and a high shriek of feedback blasted through the speakers in the chamber and in her headset; she clapped both hands to her head. On the monitor something white rushed nearer and nearer: a white cross--no, she realized, it had white wings, a sharply pointed head and a flaring tail...the image of a white bird filled the entire screen until its closeness dissolved it into static. Foreign magic severed her from her workings momentarily--she felt a strange force passing through her, a chill power, and she struggled to identify its flavor--
/Tiferet./
The Heart of Hearts....
Then it was gone, as insubstantial as smoke or dreams, vanishing as if it had been unreal in the first place. Her displays cleared rapidly, and the moment they were restored Beast flung a red alert box across her screen.
***DRAGON OF HEAVEN***
"/Shit!/" She glanced into the partition, though she already suspected it would be empty; finding out for sure that it was, she added a few more choice locker room words. "Beast! We're going back to CLAMP Campus! /Now!/" Almost pitifully eager to do battle with something, Beast was more than happy to comply. Her perception rode the computer's as its communication request flashed out of the Government Building and through Tokyo's maze of cables, leapfrogging slower packets of information, priority routed by an urgent need that she didn't have time to analyze. Hurling herself from Beast's carrier wave at the nearest nexus to the Campus, she broke through the firewall like an avalanche and tore across the network, aiming straight for the hub. She hit the system's core head-on and there was only a password barrier, a black and silent gate awaiting a key. The software that it was composed of yielded immediately to her demand, giving her the data that she required at once, as obedient as any other program would be, any program but one...she entered the serenity of the innermost system, its functions running smoothly despite the havoc that she'd caused outside, and she stared down its straight-running pathways of code, though she already knew what she'd see. She'd known it from the moment that she'd reached the defensive software and had found no living guardian to confront her. Wherever she looked, there was only the familiar firing of electron impulses: bare existence and nonexistence trading places, a space that was simple and clean and spare.
TARGET? Beast pleaded, seeing through her eyes so much sensitive data that was waiting to be laid claim to or destroyed. TARGET?
"Hush a moment," she breathed. She had the defenses of CLAMP Campus right there in her hand, but somehow it absolutely failed to seem important. Not if she couldn't locate the thing that she was looking for--and she didn't even know what she was looking for, what it was so imperative for her to find. What was it that had made the Magician program so different from all the others?
Why did she want so much for it to be alive...?
She backed out of the inner core and let the password barrier glide shut behind her. Beast whined bitterly, but she didn't care--there was something else she needed to do. It was mere fractions of a second before she found the security camera software and patched the image of the main computer room through to a monitor inside Beast's shell. Pulling herself back to her body almost wearily, she stared through her face-screen at the image.
If Magician had been destroyed...if the interference of the Dragon of Heaven had kept the program from being returned to the system in time....
She wanted to see the face of the person who was responsible.
The room had a muddled sort of ambient lighting, but she could see the figures well enough as they moved in and out of shadow. They were huddled in two groups--two people crouching over something on the floor and blocking her view of it, two others slumped together against a computer workstation. She zoomed in closer. One of the standing people resolved into the Dragons of Heaven's Kamui, his face and form extremely familiar after so many viewings. The other was a young, dark haired man who leaned heavily on the teenager, eyes closed, as Kamui struggled to support his weight. Kamui's mouth was moving silently--the camera picked up no sounds--but Satsuki wasn't interested in him. Not even in the violet gaze that had evoked such a response from her before, telling her that interesting times were on the way...he wasn't what she was after now. The other's face came into view more clearly as he collapsed away from Kamui and into the workstation's chair. He fell across its low arm while Kamui hovered over him, and it took no time at all for Beast to scan her file of important persons and return a match for that very particular face.
Sumeragi Subaru....
"Is it you?" she whispered.
Movement from the other people distracted her then, and she shifted the camera back as one of them straightened, waving toward a corner of the room. She noticed men entering through a light-filled doorway--white uniformed men carrying packages of medical equipment that endless news broadcasts about the earthquake disasters had made tediously familiar. The figure that had gestured started to get to his feet, and with a lurch she realized that the thing on the floor was another person. "Get out of my way," she muttered frantically. "I can't see!" She leaned forward, trying to will the standing man to move aside; he wavered, then stepped backward as the medics converged, and for a minute she had a glimpse....
A silver headset, bizarrely ornate to her eyes but not so strange that she couldn't recognize its function, tumbled onto the carpeted floor, rolling to a stop beneath a leather swivel chair. It left behind a head of rumpled blond hair and a face that was pale and very still. She could see one arm flung outward, clothed in the crisp white sleeve of a fine shirt, and at the shoulder a grey flash of what looked like a suit vest. Her gaze went back to the face--it was a beautiful face, she just had time to realize, before the man who was still kneeling by that person's side bowed over it, blue hair spilling forward as he breathed into the motionless lips. Breath followed breath as she focused in close again, struggling to see what was going on. He sat back, and as one of the medics passed in a white blur across the camera to crouch across from him, she noticed the fallen man's lashes crack apart. Incredible sapphire eyes tracked past the looming men; they turned, glazed though they were, to look straight at her...they looked right into the camera lens, and one corner of those lips curved upward before the clear plastic of a respirator mask came down over them and the blue eyes rolled back and closed again.
Satsuki slammed her hand down, cutting off the monitor, and a convulsive silent impulse sent the connector cables snaking out of her flesh, a familiar sting that rapidly dulled into a tingle. She fumbled open the chamber's canopy, and as Beast beeped over and over, flashing strings of frantic queries across its monitors, she scrambled out and leaped for the ground. She lost her balance on the landing and stumbled to her knees on the metal floor, her breath frosting in the room's frigid air. She hugged her arms around her stomach and bent forward over them, clenching her jaw against the feelings that rose and rose like waves.
::IF YOU KNEW::
::YOU MIGHT BE ANGRY::
Water burned salt at the corner of her lashes before her lids came down to seal those tears away.
"You...."