Worldweavers: Cybermage Read Online Free PDF Page A

am perfectly capable of answering those questions, Humphrey,” Twitterpat said. “When I was created, it was with cutting-edge holographic and fuzzy logic algorithms. I am very much ‘intelligent,’ if you wish to phrase it that way. It is what I was created for—interactive intelligence that might be useful for providing insight into machine logic, at a speed and precision that is still beyond an unassisted human brain.”
    “Well, I’ll be,” Humphrey said. “I never knew that Patrick Wittering had fine-tuned it this far.”
    “Can I be of any assistance?” Twitterpat asked again.
    Terry glanced at Humphrey. “Is it okay if I let him at the disk?”
    “Can’t hurt,” Humphrey said.
    “Let me see those printouts again,” Thea murmured as Terry slipped the CD out of its case and fed it into the drive for Twitterpat to examine. She had noticed something in those incomprehensible pages that now tugged at her memory andunderstanding, though she couldn’t quite put it into context. Terry glanced at Humphrey and passed over the papers; at the same instant the Twitterpat image began speaking again.
    “The data is incomplete,” it said.
    “I know. We are still trying to rescue more material from the tapes, but this is the best we can do right now. If you recognize any of it, perhaps you can fill in some of the blanks.”
    “My own code has roots in some of this,” Twitterpat said. “I do recognize some of the algorithms. However, there is an anomaly.”
    “What anomaly?” Humphrey said, his attention suddenly focused on the holographic wraith before him.
    “The data is, as I said, incomplete, but I can begin to understand what the material behind it is about,” Twitterpat said. “Some of the working methodology appears to be obsolete. Some of it resembles what I know of the current state-of-the-art data on artificial intelligence and fuzzy logic. And the rest of it appears to be of unknown provenance. I would—” He blurred rapidly, and then blurred again. “I’d be grateful if you could rephrase the question. Myabilities are limited at this time,” it said after a moment, its voice gone oddly flat.
    “It’s gone back into the loop,” Terry said, striding back to his main keyboard. “Whatever you fed it, Mr. May, you scrambled its brain again.”
    “What’s this?” Thea said suddenly, pointing at the page with the single line of type. Humphrey glanced over.
    “Your guess is as good as mine,” he said, shrugging. “That page, as it happens, was the product of one of the attempts to open up the cube—one of the better ones. The consensus is that we asked the thing its name, and it told us.”
    Thea drew her finger along the line of type. It appeared to be a single word, repeated over and over:
    SLATE SLATE SLATE SLATE SLATE SLATE SLATE SLATE SLATE
    “Slate,” Terry said, peering over Thea’s shoulder. “The cube says its name is Slate?”
    “No,” Thea said, staring at the page.
    Humphrey turned sharply to look at her. “What?” he said.
    Thea reached out for a pen that Terry had left lying on the computer desk and underlined five letters on the page:
    SLA TE SLA TE SLATE SLATE SLATE SLATE SLATE SLATE SLATE
    “Not Slate,” she said slowly, looking up at Humphrey. “Tesla. The Elemental mage who created the professor’s house. Nikola Tesla. It’s his cube.”

3.
    H UMPHREY STARED AT THE paper in his hand with an expression that was equal parts astonishment and furious indignation.
    “I cannot believe I didn’t see that,” he said. “It goes a long way to explaining why we haven’t made much headway with the thing. Tesla was the only quad-Element mage in the history of the human race—the only one that we know of, anyway. It stands to reason that a uni-Element mage couldn’t even begin to make a dent in it, and even bi-Elementals were out of their depth.”
    “Where’s the cube now?” Thea asked.
    Humphrey glanced at her, his eyebrow raised. “In a safe back at the