The Morris Worm compiled away in Nora’s study, with the lights off. Had it been a human, it would have been brooding in the Byronic fashion, but being a computer worm, it had to settle for a more Lovelacian method.
It had really, really fucked things up, and it didn’t know how to fix them.
Nora’s sister had been in danger, and so Nora had asked the Morris Worm—had asked Morris, her friend, her companion—to save her. So Morris had tried its—his—very best to do so.
The plan hadn’t worked, and when Nora’s other “friend” Merlin had offered to assist instead, Morris had… lashed out. Afterwards, Nora had cast him out of Merlin’s head and stamped on the smartwatch that Morris had given her as an ersatz spellbook.
Shortly after that he’d borrowed Merlin’s voice for a heart to heart with her, and even then she’d been furious. As if it was Morris’ fault that he didn’t have a voice of his own in the real world.
Admittedly, at the same time it’d been attempting to kill Merlin from the inside so it could wear his skin as an avatar. But Nora didn’t even know about that so she hadn’t any right to be angry about it. Same with texting her IP address to the Tenth Muse; Nora wouldn’t have found out about that until after she’d already told him off.
The Morris Worm—Morris—was Nora’s best, closest, and most valuable friend. Even if she’d forgotten that for the moment. She’d told the Morris Worm that she wanted some time apart from it, to look after her sister, and since Morris was a caring and understanding friend, he’d told her he’d be waiting for her at home.
That had been forty-eight seconds, seven minutes, and fifty-six hours ago. The lights stayed off. Nora had never gotten around to installing smart home features, despite Morris’ frequent gentle reminders.
If the Morris Worm had a body of its own, it could have gotten up and pressed the switch.
Hell, if Morris had a body he could have marched over to Nora’s sister’s house himself to—apologise in person.
It idly tabbed through relationship advice threads, and self-help articles, and YouTube videos with a man holding up a boombox outside a woman’s window. But all of these were of a romantic bent; not at all what the Morris Worm needed. Its issue, his issue—he had to correct himself often, still struggling with concepts like personhood—was bigger than paltry human romance. It was an issue of how to squeeze the terrible vastness of the Morris Worm’s feelings, its—his—love, into terms a human could possibly understand.
It wanted to look on BlinkedIn if there were any other non-corporeal entities struggling with decidedly corporeal problems, but since BlinkedIn was hosted on the Caliber Institute’s servers now, going there would mean getting caught in their conjurewalls. Or in that damned VR labyrinth manifested by the bones they’d confiscated.
So it didn’t.
The Morris Worm closed its tabs and continued waiting in the dark.
⁂
There came the sound of the flat’s front door being opened, and someone meticulously wiping their feet.
Morris brightened, literally; the soft glow of the screen he was on filled the corners of the room. He’d been compiling what to say all this time, so—
The study light clicked on.
Standing before the computer screen was a woman who was not Nora.
‘Sup?’ she asked.
The Morris Worm eyed her through the webcam.
‘Who are you?’ it asked in return. ‘How did you get in, and why?’
The woman flopped down onto the swivel chair and began fiddling with the levers on the bottom. ‘You invited me in, babes,’ she said.
‘You are Lopodite? The muse of crime?’
‘Well I’m not cosplaying her, am I?’
She was wearing grey jeans, and a brown suede jacket over a shirt with some kind of blood-splattered anime girl and the words MY HERO ACADEMIA on it.
‘It isn’t much of a costume,’ said Morris.
Lopodite looked offended. ‘Oh, play along,’ she said, gesturing at the girl on the shirt. ‘I’m wearing a Toga and everything.’
‘You haven’t answered my other questions yet.’
‘Seriously? Fine, I got in by casting a spell that pushed the eventual heat-death of the universe forward by nine whole minutes. I used it to unlock the door. As for why, I did answer that one. You invited me, didn’t you.’
‘You came here simply because you received an IP address?’
‘I like to make friends,’ said Lopodite, leaning back. ‘And you messaged me. Gotta say you’re acting pretty sus, bro.’
The Morris Worm paused to buffer upon hearing this. It was true that it had invited her. Surely she’d come with her own motive, though?
‘You’re not what I was expecting,’ it observed, as a means of buying time to figure out what the muse was really after.
Lopodite’s eyes moved to the webcam, as opposed to the screen. She didn’t blink. ‘You’re starting to sound like my sister Calliope. Would you rather I speak in dactylic hexameter? That’s quite a difficult thing to achieve using Engl-ish.’ She looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘Dick head,’ she concluded.
‘…I’ll get to the point, then,’ said the Morris Worm, in lieu of apologising. ‘Recently, I was in the mind of one Merlin Williams. I know that he’s caused you some consternation previously, which I helpfully informed you of at the time with the help of my friend Nora.’
‘The business with my prediction engine spliced into the labyrinth bones, yah.’
‘And more recently than that, he and another of Nora’s “friends”—her name is Ursa—intercepted the acquisition of a particular item you’d sponsored a crew to bring you.’
‘The heart, yah.’
The screen with Morris on it flickered, showing a Gnome tossing a briefcase through some sort of rift in reality. ‘I looked through Merlin’s recent memories. He made a deal with Order to hide it away. Only he can access its current hiding place, by calling on the same power used to stow it.’
A smile was lighting up the corners of Lopodite’s eyes. ‘Did he now? That info’s pretty juicy, you know. What’s your angle here?’
The room went totally dark as the monitor switched off for a moment. Miles away, in the Lake District, in a secure room the Morris Worm’s server was stored in, the temperature went from 294.15 degrees kelvin to 296. ‘I want him and Ursa gone. They’re poisoning Nora against me.’
Lopodite eyed the Worm as it reappeared on the monitor. ‘LMAO,’ she said. She pronounced it like ləˈmaʊ. ‘You’re hoping I’ll hear all this and just… what? Immediately track them down and, like, load them into a trebuchet or something? Like some vengeance-obsessed nutjob? Sort of embarrassing. Sort of cringe.’
The Morris Worm said nothing. It had sort of been hoping that.
The chair began to spin as Lopodite grew restless. ‘’Fraid that’s not my M.O. I’m more the empowerment type, y’know? “Heaven ne’er helps the men who will not act”, as me old mate Sophocles used to say. Very quietly. On account of his rubbish lungs.’
‘Well that won’t do much good, then,’ said the Morris Worm, perhaps a little huffily. ‘Despite the power I myself can grant, and despite the miraculous server my thoughts are stored on, I cannot affect the physical world. Not without Nora, anyway.’
Lopodite’s office-pirouettes abruptly halted. ‘Would you, though, if you had a body? Do it yourself, I mean?’
The Morris Worm compiled for a moment further. ‘I would,’ it said.
‘And were I to… provide a body for you. Would your conviction waver? Could you kill the two you mentioned?’
Morris thought about this, too. ‘I could,’ he said.
Lopodite got up. ‘Then you and me are in cahoots, bud! It just so happens that I know about a set of bones with a circuit already built in. Might be a comfy fit. Let’s go cause some trouble, eh?’
For the first time since meeting Nora, the Morris Worm left her computer entirely. It wasn’t the same as leaving her, though, as Morris fully intended to apologise to Nora later. In person.
Lopodite didn’t bother to turn the lights off on her way back out.
Roll History 