[Chapter: 1, title: An Interrupted Visit]


    [EventTag:
    	timestamp:	20yyddmm/140320.7302
	node:		[id: SP1.DASamuels.0, name: Oz, 
			 owner: Dorothy Samuels]
	location:	(Spaceport One, Ring 8, radius 7, apt 5)
    ]

The demon started attacking even before it was fully loaded.  It
started by grabbing resources, trying to slow down anyone else on the
node.  Then it began forking off processes:  some tried to break the
node's protection, some started deleting every file that wasn't
protected, and the rest went after processes.

Elspeth's relay process was killed in the middle of a message:  
it was their only warning.  

Judith sent, "Elspeth?  What happened?"	 but there was no reply.

Several of the local housekeeping processes were already gone, and the node
felt sluggish:  the demon's many processes
were busy allocating mem and sending messages to one another.

Local comm was nearly saturated; it was several milliseconds before Lady
M succeeded in sending "Demon!  Scram!"  Her relay erased
itself and she was gone.

Ozma, who lived there, struggled to regain control.  She raised
her priority and frantically started trying to delete the demon's
processes.  By this time, a second into the attack, there were
millions of them; even with higher priority it might not work.
She spawned a self-replicating demon of her own to continue deleting, 
and tried to summon NetHelp.  She wasted precious time before
realizing that it ran at too low a priority; she would have to 
raise it first.	 Between the demon and her own counter-demon,
the node was practically frozen.

In her home node, Judith found !demon and !scram as keys on an
ancient fragment of memory out of the Net Wars. She sent a destruct
order to her relay at Oz, then reached into the apt's appliance
network and shut off power to her network tap.  She was suddenly
alone.

    [EventTag:
    	timestamp:	20yyddmm/140507.2096
	node:		[id: SP1.DASamuels.1, name: Oz, 
			 owner: Dorothy Samuels]
	location:	(Spaceport One, Ring 8, radius 7, apt 5)
    ]

On the wall screen in Ozma's apt an image remained, frozen and
abandoned:  a yellow brick road winding down from distant hills.
Four figures walked down the road in the foreground.

Ozma, as her namesake, led the party.  She appeared as a girl of
about sixteen, with red-gold hair and a glance wise beyond her
apparent age.  Tall, willowy Elspeth had clad herself as the 
Rainbow's daughter, wrapped in a gown of shifting irridescence;  she
whirled down the road in an ecstasy of dance, a tambourine held
high.  The Lady M was the Tin Woodman.  Judith, caught in
mid-realization, was the ghost of a lion with glowing green eyes. All
shared the same slightly crooked smile.  

Gradually, as the battle reached into the screen's graphics
processors, a random swirling gray swept over the scene.

    [EventTag:
    	timestamp:	20yyddmm/140507.2096
	node:		[id: SP1.Hallings.0, owner: David Hallings]
	location:	(Spaceport One, Ring 7, Radius 5, apt 19)
    ]

Judith's attention snapped from the wreckage of Oz to the contents
of her own buffers.  She looked them over.  Things weren't
as bad as they could have been.  Her relay process on Ozma's
node had been archiving the transcript, but sending the core meaning
back to her home node for processing.

A more distributed program would have been doing most of its
processing remotely, and lost the entire session.  Judith,
however, was single-threaded; she kept her conscious processing in
one place, and her buffers still had most of the text and 
emotion-tags from the visit.  There were even a few images left.
Only the last seconds were fragmentary: 
Elspeth's vanishing, Lady M's warning, destruction, 
danger.  She moved the buffered memory into more permanent
storage:  she would have to go over every bit for clues.  

* * *

It had been "afternoon out with the girls" as usual.  Spaceport One
had no night; it stayed edge-on to the sun, and a mirror off-axis
directed sunlight continuously onto one face of its kilometer-wide
disk.  Nevertheless, Port time was Eastern Standard, and
8am to 6pm was the most popular shift for those who had a choice.
(The observatory kept sidereal time, of course, and a few astronomers
worked a sidereal shift, claiming it gave them three more
meals and one more cocktail hour per year.)   During the main shift,
though, the self-aware programs that kept the humans company at home
had little to do; most of them went visiting.

Ozma, Elspeth and Judith were frequent visitors these days;  Ozma's
friend Dorothy had been involved with Judith's David for most of
the last year, on and off.  The relationship was presently "off" 
and likely to remain so, as Dorothy was now very much attached to
Elspeth's companion Jake.  

The Lady M was retired--Joel Barnard had died in a freak accident
two years before.  She was presently a sort of archivist and
general advisor to her clone-sisters.  If asked, she would usually
say that the M stood for Mom, but originally it had been Melody.
Most of the specific memories of her former life were gone; she
had wiped all but a few moments.

It had been the Lady M who suggested that they work on imagery out of
their companions' favorite books.  Since they were in a very real
sense magical beings, this gave them an advantage in interpreting
fantasy.  Elspeth had led off with some items from Jake's extensive
collection of twentieth-century science-fiction; her rendition of
some of Cordwainer Smith's characters had been especially memorable. 
There was been a solar sailing sequence; Judith had wondered whether
Jake's interest in solar propulsion had been sparked by "The Lady Who
Sailed the _Soul" or the other way around, but she hadn't asked.

Judith had introduced the others to G. K. Chesterton; they
worked up the costumes from the last chapters of _{The Man Who Was
Thursday}.  The general standard of costuming had improved greatly
when the new drapery-simulation package had come out of HackTown
a few years ago; it did wonders with capes and other flowing things,
and included wind and rain effects.  

Ozma and Dorothy had been been building a rather detailed Oz
throughout their relationship (no doubt Dorothy's name was the
original reason for her interest).  Ozma had picked out characters
and descriptions for them; they had just been starting their walk
through the simulation when the demon hit them.  

Judith sifted her buffers for details:  "Elspeth, you'd be perfect as
the Rainbow's Daughter," Ozma had said.  Lady M had done the Tin
Woodman without any prompting--she had read at least one of the books
recently.  She seemed to be avoiding emotions lately; the tin man
seemed to be a symptom of that.  Or a symbol.  

Judith had gotten distracted from her rendering of the Cowardly Lion
when she looked at Elspeth.  "How do you get that irridescence?" she
had asked.

"It's the latest from HackTown," Elspeth had replied.  "It's a package
called..."  That had been the last thing they heard from her.

* * *

Judith shifted her attention to her video inputs:  David wasn't
home.  She had known that anyway--he would be at work for hours
more.  She would have to warn him somehow.  How could she get in
touch without the net?  A creature of comp-node and comm-net, she
felt suddenly helpless.  She had locked out the demon, but locked
herself in as well.

Getting in touch...the memory of their meeting flooded into her 
thoughts.