Codespell by Kelly McCullough Page B

inconsequential, and in those cases the worlds just tend to collapse back together. Tiny changes can have huge effects on big systems, but mostly they don’t. Reality has a lot of inertia, and until very recently Necessity had strongly added to the effect, forcing most world splits back together. But now, with Necessity off-line and as many as half the links in the mweb broken—my mind boggled.

    “The Fates are very concerned,” said Cerice, and it was obvious that she was as well. “The Fate Core is doing things they don’t understand, self-programming weird work-arounds involving the old ley-line network, and spontaneously growing whole tiers of subroutines.”

    “Very concerned, that’s euphemese for wigging out, right?” Melchior asked around the beam, inserting himself into the conversation for the first time.

    “Pretty much,” answered Cerice. “When they switched the soul-tracking and management system over from the ley net to the mweb a generation ago, they mostly closed down the ley architecture. A lot of the original infrastructure for running it doesn’t even exist anymore.”

    “The old spinnerettes,” I said.

    “Exactly. But now the Fate Core appears to be re-creating them all on its own, and the Fates are beginning to think it’s become self-aware.”

    I felt like a whole herd of icy-footed spiders had decided to hold a dance competition on my back. The Fates Do Not Like things to get out of their control—the current extremely complex state of my life is a testament to this fact. Calling them control freaks is akin to calling Ares a fight fan. The idea that the Fate Core—the computer that had replaced the Great Loom of Fate—might have become a creature with a will of its own would not be well received. Nor would the resurrection of the spinnerettes, and the Fates would be looking for someone to blame. The dancing spiders upped the tempo.

    Every world had ley lines, spontaneously generated magical networks that connect the thin points in the walls of reality, the places where the Primal Chaos leaks through and makes magic easier. The Fates had always used them to monitor worlds and manage life threads, but a Fate had to physically go to a world to tap into its ley net. Sometime around the birth of the Roman Empire, the system had expanded beyond the ability of the Fates to manage it all directly. For another hundred years or so they’d kept trying, but the problem had only gotten exponentially worse.

    Then Lachesis had reluctantly advanced the idea of the spinnerette, an elaborate, entirely magical entity that could both be tied in to the ley net of a world and transmit information and commands across the gulf between worlds. Because the process was so complex, and the devices would have to operate largely independently, the Fates had been forced to give them their own direct taps into the Primal Chaos for power and considerable self-awareness. In order to reduce their ability to cause the Fates problems, the spinnerettes had been bound to a set of rules of conduct and to physical items or locations.

    But they were creatures of pure chaos magic and correspondingly rebellious. Over the years quite a number of them managed to trick mortals into aiding them to escape their servitude, most famously the one Aladdin had found bound to a lamp and mistakenly called a genie. The Fates absolutely hated having to use them but had no alternatives until the invention of the computer, which they had delightedly used to replace the spinnerettes. Not long after that, Necessity had transformed herself into the ultimate supercomputer to cope with the ever-expanding structure of reality. Then she’d spun the mweb to help her in the task, making the Fates its administrators and putting them eternally in her debt and, not coincidentally, under her thumb.

    That was then. Now, Necessity was broken, the whole system was coming apart with wildly unpredictable results, and a good argument could be made