The Weapon - Oblivion  - part 6

By Diana the Valkyrie

Sex and power.

Update: 28/07/2003 to valkyrie05





Simon:



"Help desk here, how may I help you?" That's the new phrase we're supposed to

use, it's stupid, it's ungrammatical and it sucks. "Try turning the computer

off and then on again. You're welcome." Stupid users.



Lunch was an hour ago. In half an hour, I'll take a coffee break, and in two

hours, I'll go home and reflect on the futility of my job. I feel like I'm the

little Dutch boy with his finger in the dyke, except that this particular dyke

springs a dozen leaks per hour, and I only have ten fingers. Plus, I don't

give a stuff about the polders getting flooded. They aren't my polders.



And then, I'm explaining over the phone to a particular stupid luser who is

incapable of doing what I tell him to do, each time he gallops off and does

something else, doesn't tell me what he's doing, then stops and expects me to

know what he's done, and I suddenly stopped talking.



I stopped talking, because to talk, you need air.



I didn't have any air, because I'd just breathed out, and just as I was about

to breathe in again, something happened that interrupted that process.



I've read about her. I've seen pictures of her. I once saw a piece on the TV

about her. But none of that was any useful preparation for the real thing.



The first thing I thought when I saw her, was sex. I suppose I think about sex

as often as the next guy, but she seized my brain and stamped SEX all over it.

The second thing I thought, was power. Why? Because anyone who stands in front

of you, hovering several inches clear of the floor, is obviously incredibly

powerful. Plus, like I said, I've read about her. And the hover made it

abundantly clear that she was the real thing, not some pretty girl in a

costume.



The costume was a bit breath-taking too. Skin-tight, showing every ripple and

curve. And there were a lot of curves, some of them really very curvy. Plenty

of ripples, too. Brilliant white, and warm gold for the tunic and skirt, black

gloves and boots. And a billowing, flowing white cape off her shoulders. And

pretty wasn't the word, she was absolutely stunning. Sex and power.



"Hi," she said.



I collected those parts of my brain that hadn't gone totally AWOL and crammed

them back into my skull, hung up the phone on the luser-of-the-week, and found

a suitably witty and impressive reply from my great repertoire of chat lines.

"Hi."



"I have a problem," she said. No you don't, I thought. "Yes I do," she said.

"It's her memory," said a short dumpy guy with grey hair and a grey suit

standing by her side and slightly behind her; I hadn't noticed him before. She

gestured at him, and he pulled out his PDA and started looking at it. "It's my

memory," she said. "Pull up a chair and tell me what seems to be the problem,"

I answered, in my best bedside manner. She smiled like a sunrise, and sat

down. She didn't bother with a chair; she just sat on nothing whatsoever. Sex

and power.



She explained to me that she had a digital memory, and I started to understand

why she thought it might be the sort of problem I could help with. And then

she explained that, although her memory ought to be 100%, she'd found that she

was forgetting things.



"Do you know what you've forgotten," I asked, and then realised what an

incredibly stupid question that was, of course you can't. "Yes, some of it,"

she replied, "such as, the first time I made love to Duncan." I looked at the

grey man. "He isn't Duncan," she said. He grinned at me. Then I registered

what she'd just told me. Sex. "The Rite of Binding," she said, "with my

Wielder." And power.



Not the sort of thing one would forget. "And you don't remember it at all?" I

asked. "Yes, I remember it perfectly," she replied. "Uh," I said. "A couple of

days ago I forgot it. But now I remember it. Well, no, it isn't quite that

simple. I don't actually remember it, but I remember remembering it. I have a

memory of the memory"



Ah. Intermittent memory problem, we see those all the time. "So how bad is

it?" I asked, "how often do you forget things, and how much do you forget?" "I

don't know," she said. "You see," I continued, "if it's only a little bit, and

only occasionally, then that's not as bad as if you lose great chunks for

important stuff all the time." "How can I know?" she asked, "it's like you

said, I don't know what isn't there." "Checksumming," I suggested.



She put her head to one side and frowned slightly, interrogatively.



"You take chunks of, ah, data, and you do an MD5 checksum of the chunk, you

make a list of those, and you, um, write it out to a different, um, device

from the one you're diagnosing." "Like, I put it on a computer?" she asked.

"Yes, that sort of thing." She wrinkled her nose. I suppose our computers were

pretty primitive to her. "Then you recompute the MD5s each day, and you see

what's changed. That tells you the extent of the problem, it might also tell

you which, er, memory component, you need to, er, replace. Or fix. Or

something. How does your memory work, anyway?" "Quantum states," she said,

obscurely. I nodded wisely, as of one who knew all about quantum states, and

thinking, I'll google that as soon as I can.



She gave me a brilliant smile, and stood up. "You've been very helpful," she

said, "if you ever need a fireball to be extinguished, let me know." "Um,

yes," I said, "fireball?" "You call them stars," she explained. She wasn't

serious, of course. Surely. Was she?



I sat there in a sort of daze after she left, running it all through my memory

again, trying to make sure it stayed. I had a feeling that I'd just reached

the high point in my entire low-value life. Sex and power.