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A muddy square of parchment. Written on it, in Hebrew binary, was the code that made Byron tick.
"Do… it… quick… " croaked Byron. Without his code, his eyes were rolling. The floor shook as his system crashed.
I tore the parchment in half. Byron convulsed.
I put one half of the parchment back in Byron's open chest. His body went limp. I rolled Nancy on her back. She was blue all over; black fluid leaked from her scars. We were nearly out of time.
I bent over her, latched my fingers into one of the big scars on her chest. Then I peeled her open.
I didn't look inside. The stench of decay was appalling. That and the awful, liquid feel of her. She was going to pieces, fast. Eyes shut, I thrust the second half of the parchment under what was left of her ribs. Her lungs billowed over my knuckles; her heart drummed like a scared rabbit against my wrist. I let go the parchment, pulled my hands out, pressed the edges of the scar together. I opened my eyes, held my breath.
Nancy lay still. Her skin was one big bruise. Her scars looked like a black spider's web.
Then she convulsed, coughed up white froth, started breathing. Pink heat flooded her skin, she opened her eyes and pushed my hands away.
"Get your hands off my chest, pervert!" she said.
I looked over at Byron. He was resculpting his pectorals.
"You okay?" I said.
"I feel… just the same," he said.
"That's the thing with golem binary code," I said. "Ripping it up doesn't hurt it. It's neat technology. Especially since it shouldn't work at all, on account of the Hebrew numerical system not having any zeroes."
"Come again?"
"No zeroes. So they have to make the code nullatorily recursive."
"Huh?"
"It's simple: every phrase in the code points down to a smaller phrase buried in the previous line. And that smaller phrase points down to a smaller phrase still. The recursion is infinite, so even though there's no zeroes you get an infinite number of holes where a zero could fit. So the programmers just write the rest of the code around those holes and the SGOS-that's the standard golem operating system-fills in the gaps. It interpolates the places where the programmers want the zeroes to be and bingo-you get Hebrew binary. All of which is irrelevant."
"It is?"
"Yeah. But the side-effect isn't."
"What side-effect?"
"All that recursion means a golem's code parchment is like one big hologram. Every piece holds all the information contained by the whole. So you can rip a parchment in half and still have two complete pieces of golem code. It's a fractal thing-don't ask me, ask Mandelbrot."
"So… Nancy's ru
"You got it."
"Doesn't mean we're engaged or anything," said Nancy. Then she fell, sobbing, into Byron's enormous clay arms.
They left hand in hand, like unmatched bookends. Without any books. I watched them disappear into the rain and tried to puzzle it out.
Did the shared code mean they were brother and sister now? Soul mates? Clones? But Nancy still had her memories, her personality. And Byron had his. They hadn't changed.
Which made me think back to what Arachne had said about Nancy:
My needlework is good, but it ca
So if I'd managed to fix Nancy up with golem code, that could only mean one thing: by opening up Byron's chest I hadn't got my hands on a scrap of parchment at all.
I'd got my hands on a soul.
Byron was right after all.
I spent a while scrubbing the stains on the floor. The silt washed out okay. The gore took longer. Neither went completely. I wondered if I should get a new carpet. But, like I said, that old carpet's got a lot of stories to tell. And it goes with the drapes.
I closed the trapdoor, fixed myself a coffee. I slipped the dimension-die back in my collar. Good job I'd remembered to get it back. You never know when you'll need a spare dimension. Shame there were only five sides left.
Outside, a municipal garbage truck had arrived to clear away the petrified zombies. I watched the golems work in their yellow municipal jackets. They trudged and, where the rain lashed them, they went soft round the edges.
I wondered if I should tell them what I knew.
One of the golems bent to pick up something from the gutter. It was a flower from Pallas Athene's crown. The golem straightened the petals and tucked the flower in his jacket pocket. Then he went back to work.
I closed the drapes. They'd figure it out for themselves, sooner or later.
It Washed Up by Joe R. Lansdale
In the moonlight, in the starlight, the churning waves seemed white with laundry soap. They crashed against the shore and the dark rocks there, and when they rolled back they left wads of seaweed and driftwood and all the tossed garbage and chunks of sewage that man had given the sea.
All the early night and into the midnight hour, the junk washed up, and then, a minute past one, when the sea rolled out and took its laundry soap waves with it, a wad of seaweed from which clinging water dripped like shiny pearls, moved. It moved and it stood up and the shiny pearls of water rolled over the seaweed, and the sewage clung tight and the thing took shape, and the shape was that of a man, featureless and dark and loose as the wind.
The seaweed and sewage man, gone shiny from the pearl drops of sea foam, walked toward town, and in the town it heard the clang and clatter of automobiles out on the brightly lit street, and it saw the street from its position in a dark alley, watched the cars zoom by and heard the people shout, and it chose to stick to the dark.
It went along the dark alley and turned down an even more narrow and darker alley, and walked squishing along that path until it came to the back of a theater where an old man with a harmonica and a worn-out hat sat on a flattened cardboard box and played a bluesy tune until he saw the thing from the ocean shuffle up.
The thing twisted its head when the music stopped, stood over the man, reached out and took the hat from the man's head and put it on its own. Startled, the man stood, and when he did, the thing from the ocean snatched his harmonica. The man broke and ran.
The thing put the harmonica in its mouth and blew, and out came a toneless sound, and then it blew again, and it was a better sound this time; it was the crash of the sea and the howl of the wind. It started walking away, blowing a tune, moving its body to a boogie-woogie rhythm and a two-step slide, the moves belying the sound coming from the instrument, but soon sound and body fell in line, swaying to the music, blowing harder, blowing wilder. The notes swept through the city like bats in flight.
And out into the light went the thing from the ocean, and it played and it played, and the sound was so loud cars slammed together and people quit yelling, and pretty soon they were lining up behind the thing from the ocean, and the thing played even louder, and those that fell in line behind it moved as it moved, with a boogie-woogie rhythm and a two-step slide.
Those who could not walk pushed the wheels of their wheel chairs, or gave their electric throttles all the juice, and there were even cripples in alleyways who but minutes before had been begging for money, who bounced along on crutches, and there were some without crutches, and they began to crawl, and the dogs and the cats in the town followed suit, and soon all that was left in the town were those who could not move at all, the infants in their cribs, the terminally sick, and the deaf who couldn't hear the tune, and the thing from the ocean went on along and all of the townspeople managed after.