Sexy's Devils

by Cerise Palmer

Copyright (c) 1990

A run of luck always sneaks up slowly, then accelerates so precipitously that just trying to maintain the big picture can literally make you dizzy. And thus it was that Dexter Fox found his computer hyper-responsive, breathtakingly quick, almost as if the machine itself, fascinated by the program he'd outlined, were exceeding its own capacities out of some innate need to problem-solve. Things had been steadily improving for three days now; he'd debugged a quirky parser the first night, built an incremental speller the second, and was currently patching up, much to his surprise, that ambiguity resolution program his thesis advisor had recommended he leave to the hotshots at a bigger university.

As if on cue, Seymour Kofant burst through Dexter's door at nine, the squeaky drumroll of his sneakersteps still reverberating in the hall. He glared at Dexter wordlessly, his brows converging and an irate pucker to his mouth which made his moustache twitch as with an imminent sneeze.

"Howdy, Sy," managed Dexter in response. Might as well get this over with.

"I don't believe it. Your machine's still up." Sy shook his head and marvelled at Dexter's monitor a moment, where, in several windows, the lines were scrolling up furiously, at neck-and-neck intervals, like the collective output of a typist pool on Methedrine. "And you've got a program zipping along at the speed of light. What gives?"

Dexter tried not to seem smug; a difficult feat, since he hated Sy's guts. Sy was, like him, a doctoral candidate, and for two years they had shared a thesis advisor and a disquietingly similar thesis topic. Dexter had watched Phil Stein, their adviser, approve and support Sy's every move while his own were subjected to dubious scrutiny. Plus, to make matters worse, Sy (with Stein's recommendation, naturally), had just gotten a prestigious fellowship and would be able to complete his degree without working for a living.

"Don't know, Sy. Must be a bug in whatever you're trying to run."

"You're positively enjoying this, aren't you? I'm only text editing that paper Phil and I wrote last semester. You know that." With what familiarity Sy referred to their mutual lord and master; Dexter wasn't yet on a first name basis with Stein, and hadn't gotten around to co-authorship with him either.

"What can I tell you, Sy? Call a repairman if something's broken." Then he frowned at the screen as if it required his supervision. "Got to get back to work."

And Sy made his exit, red-thatched head shaking, muttering something just audible enough to sound impolite.

That scene had, more or less, played itself out three times now. Tonight, however, the script began to undergo minor revision. To begin with, Sy wasn't the only one to ambush Dexter's office demanding enlightenment; Flej Linghamani, Stan South, and Ruth Schnaz all paid him a visit in due course. Fortunately, he observed, their bewildered souls had been spared Sy's paranoia; however keen Dexter's pleasure in his computer's swift reflexes, he really couldn't claim the slightest responsibility for them.

The other new twist to the nightly routine involved what happened when Dexter tried to log off at eleven-thirty. He couldn't. The computer seemed quite set on other plans, so that Dexter's control-D provoked a flash of defiance from the screen, after which it began running his ambiguity program on the Finnegan's Wake passage which he had entered months ago in a perverse fit of frustration. Dexter felt himself considering an advanced case of the jitters. But then he decided against it, and, tidying his desk for the night, indulged in a tolerant sigh. "As long as it gets my thesis done."

Late the next afternoon, shortly before the departmental secretaries and undergrads cleared the building and went home to their apartments, trailers and dorm rooms, a representative of ConnExpert Systems, Inc. beamed up to the third floor of the Computing Lab, apparently at Sy's behest. Personally, of course, Dexter was in no rush to have his machine tampered with, despite yesterday's suggestion that Sy call someone in. Nonetheless, help was here.

"I'm Anne Starch," it rejoiced, in tones as unsullied and fresh as its white button-down blouse, "here to check out those CEXSI workstations you called about. What seems to be the problem?"

For a moment, no one answered, so startled were they to find a tool attache in the hands of a fortyish blonde over six feet tall. Then Sy, his paper close to deadline, managed to override first his tongue's jammed circuits.

"Well, Ms. Starch-- "

"Oh, please." She held one large, graceful hand up, as solemnly as a diplomat. "Call me Anne."

"Anne, then," Sy conceded, emending himself impatiently. "The problem is that the workstations, which are fine by day, malfunction disastrously at night. In fact, only one of them will work at all-- "

"That's not strictly true," chirped Flej nervously, aware he'd spoken out of turn. "Only yours goes down completely. Ruth's and Stan's and mine just work so slowly that we can't get much of anything done. Until last night, anyway. Last night the machines were all down, except for Dexter's." He flashed a tentative smile at Sy.

"As I said," continued Sy, regarding Flej with distaste, "only Dexter's, in that office to your left, will work at all. And it works abnormally fast, faster even than any of the others did when they were first installed."

"Hmm," said Anne, turning toward Dexter's office. "We sold these to your lab just last month, didn't we?"

Sy nodded, his moustache twitching like a bloodhound's jowls.

"I knew we should have stuck with more standard equipment," said Stan. He was the skeptic in the bunch, an Army colonel with doctoral aspirations, unimpressed by the course material he fought so hard to get the better of. No one could understand why he had chosen Intelligence Modelling as a field of study, but everyone stayed on good terms with him anyway, in case he wound up head of the Armed Forces Research Budget.

"But these workstations are terrific," protested Dexter. "Why, that DIABLOS firmware is an absolute godsend." And he relished Anne and his own pun in a single grin.

"What is DIABLOS, exactly?" purred Ruth in her intrepid contralto, adjusting the quarter-inch thick glasses which failed to obscure her handsome features. Sy inhaled sharply but refrained from comment; even he made allowances for the lab's most aesthetic recruit, who had defected from Communications so recently she still couldn't program her way out of a paper bag.

"DIABLOS," announced Anne, "stands for 'Distributed and Balance Loading Operating System.' It's the ultimate in network operating systems, recently patented by CEXSI, and built into the microcode of your workstations. Essentially, each workstation gives up some of its independence in exchange for an occasional power boost." And she folded her arms triumphantly.

"Perhaps we should let Ms. Starch get to work," said Sy, thumping his fingers on the wall.

"Straightaway!" concurred Anne, dipping her head beneath the doorframe to Dexter's office.

And she spent the next couple of hours checking boards, running programs, and generally conducting the kinds of tests field engineers seem to thrive on. After scrutinizing Dexter's workstation, she did sequential spot-checks on the others and could find nothing amiss. But when she tried running all the machines at once, the malady Sy had complained of appeared within seconds. She took a step back, nonplussed for the moment, and then seemed to warm, slowly but thoroughly, to a hunch of the sort that sprang Archimedes out of his bath.

"I'll be back before you know it," she assured them, and no one doubted that a cure lay within reach.

Two evenings later, Anne returned, and, after tinkering expertly with each machine's insides, requested they be called up simultaneously. For several moments, a silence precarious as suspended breath overtook the floor. Then a heartening series of hiccups, composed entirely of clicks and beeps, issued from the various offices. And, last but not least, the sound of improved-rollover keyboards under heavy assault affirmed that a successful file-check was generally underway; the only anomalous noise throughout was made by Dexter's printer, hastily coughing out several pages before it lapsed into a coma.

Before Dexter even knew she was in his office, Anne had retrieved the print-out and was reading it poised on a corner of his desk, her face virtually radiant with satisfaction. Her perusal done, she straightened matter-of-factly, smoothed a crease in her dazzling blouse-front, and waited for the others to reconvene.

Sy, as usual, was the first one through the door. He regarded Anne suspiciously. "How did you fix them?"

"You may not like this," she warned him, pulling a newsclipping from her breast-pocket and unfolding it on Dexter's desk. "I saved this from last week's paper because it disturbed me, involving CEXSI's good name as it did. The man it's about used to night-shift for the company; we never collaborated directly, but I do know that he was instrumental in developing DIABLOS. In fact, he ran the Quality Assurance tests on the workstations on this floor." She paused for effect, then nodded toward the clipping, inviting the whole group to read it:

"Transylvanian" Computer Scientist Collapses at Arraignment

Al Drake, a former employee of ConnExpert Systems, Inc., pled not guilty by reason of insanity to assault charges this morning, just moments before losing consciousness in an Orleans County courtroom. Drake had been in custody since the week before, when two off-duty policeman witnessed him wrestling a man to the ground in the parking lot of the Divisadero Pub and preparing to bite him on the neck. Drake was rushed to Canon General Hospital after collapsing, where his condition remains guarded, according to official sources.

In the State Psychiatric Hospital, which had been observing him since March 2, Drake reportedly secluded himself by day and, having refused all food and drink, required intravenous feeding; today, despite the Panama hat and dark glasses he wore to court, he was visibly distressed throughout by the skylights overhead. And yet another bizarre detail was added to Drake's profile today, by an unidentified courtroom witness who sighted what appear to be surgically-implanted fang teeth in Drake's mouth as he was carried by on stretcher.

"It was quite a job getting my client to plead properly," said Stokely Bramson, Drake's lawyer, who is confident the defendant will be dealt with leniently upon release from Canon General. "You see, despite the special effects teeth and the Bela Lugosi complex, he is a compassionate, deeply sensitive being. He feels just terrible about what he's done."

"So?" asked Stan.

"I don't understand either," admitted Ruth.

"My theory," said Anne, "is that Drake actually is a vampire, who, like your typical loner with strange habits, took up computing as a hobby. He was a brilliant systems programmer, from what I've heard; supernatural powers, no doubt, add that certain edge. Anyway, it seems he found a way to embody the essence of vampirism in DIABLOS. Dexter's machine was slightly faster than the others to begin with, so his quite naturally became the focus of the vampiric gestalt. That's why it was up when the rest of yours were down, and why, the less functional your machines became, the more impressively his worked. I think his was sucking power --sorry, folks-- out of the other workstations in the net."

"Are we supposed to believe that?" asked Sy.

"I wouldn't have asked you to fifteen minutes ago," replied Anne good-naturedly. "But then I put my hypothesis to the test and proved it right."

"How?" asked Flej, unabashedly wide-eyed.

"Well, the 'heart' of DIABLOS's bug was buried deep in the network protocol. To overcome it, I simply went into the transceiver boxes that hook the workstations to the network cable, and replaced the gold pins with silver ones."

Dexter was the only one to laugh out loud, though inwardly he groaned at the prospect of finishing his thesis sans ghostwriter. Ruth, her eyes bemused behind their icy windowpanes, stepped out to take a phone call from one of her current boyfriends. And Stan, who had sunk into yet another reverie of confusion, finally roused himself to ask what would have happened if Anne's maneuver had failed.

"Dexter's machine would have continued in the same vein -- sorry again-- drawing all it could out of the other machines in the net until they were, I hate to say, drained of juice irreparably. And then, had we decided to hook his power-thirsty machine into a new net? Who knows?" She seemed cheered by the image of such a disaster.

Dexter, chuckling less cheerfully over his own disaster, realized suddenly what he'd have to do. Since DIABLOS, after all, was hardly flesh and blood, its recent demise should prove readily reversible; if Dexter --on some deserted night or two-- swapped Anne's silver pins with gold ones, he might still have his ticket to fame, thesis approval, and excellent job offers.

Flej was struck by a thought just then. "What do you think's happening at Canon Hospital? The doctors are bound to find out there's something weird about Drake. And why is Drake such a wimp? I thought vampires, until you got a stake through them, were supposed to be invincible; why hasn't Drake bloodsucked his was to freedom yet? Any guesses?"

"Calm down, Flej," was Sy's to-the-point rejoinder.

And then Anne produced the last read-out from Dexter's printer. "We won't need to wait long for an answer to your questions, Flej," she said, and they quickly formed a reading huddle behind Flej's scrawny form:

I'm the vampire Drake. I'm immortal. And I'm tired of it.

I've walked the earth for a thousand years, the last two hundred of them a perdition of weariness and conscience. The former malady is an old one, grown more profound each time human history contrives to restage its hackneyed dramas; the latter is new to me, and I am helpless to quell it.

I shrank from hallowed objects, once, though the kiss of blood was sacred on my lips; now I fear nothing from Heaven, from Earth, or from Hell, yet I loathe beyond hope what I do nightly for sustenance. And so I choose a vampire's death, having met already my mortal demise, but not --laugh well-- without satisfying first my thirst for immortality...

Cerise Palmer maintained her sanity as a graduate student in literature by reading as much F&SF in her spare time as possible; she now tries to write as much of it as possible. She lives in Columbus, Ohio with her husband and small daughter, and is currently at work on a fantasy trilogy.

She may be reached in care of the editors.