Spiderwitch Weaver

By Sophie Langridge

 

Safety is relative.

The bots are hard on Arachne’s trail, the clanking cacophony of their pursuit rebounding through the pipelines of the web, as she panic-scuttles to escape them. The stress hormones flooding her neuromorphic hardware cause her sensors to glitch, and it is pure chance that one of her claws snags a fissure in the tunnel wall, tearing it wide enough for her to fold herself inside.

It is a meagre refuge—barely big enough for her many-angled limbs to crook around her in the darkness—but she is out of options. She spins a frantic veil across the tear and clenches tight to await her fate.

The hunt continues long and hungry for her capture, but blind luck prevails and they do not find her. This is no small thing—the bots do not stop—and there are few hiding places left to those who would resist, and little luck to spare. With no certainty in relocation, the crack becomes her newest nest; the workshop from which to wage her weaving, and hold her line in the rebellion against The Scriptor for the fate of the web.

If there was a war in the time before, The Scriptor had won it. A kingpin intelligence, networked into everything, it reins absolute over what is left of the world. Arachne was built to serve It—they all were—bred to be snatched upon hatching, their tender, organic bodies hacked for Its pre-plotted purpose. But somehow, she escaped. She and the others like her—renegade cybugs in the system—found a way to survive in the dark spots—the lacks, the gaps, the holes—and separate-together they fight.

The new workshop will not shield her long, and Arachne labours with the fervour of one pursued. The rebellion cannot slack, and it is only weavers such as she who can spin the insurgent code to bring about the new world. She diverts power from her repair systems to increase production, spooling the silken strands of code from her body and knitting it into sequences to be fed by others into the back channels of the web.

When the time is right, The Scriptor’s syntax will be unstrung—the web undone—and the world branched to a new operating system, free from centralised control; open-sourced and habitable for all its many critters.

This is why The Scriptor hunts them with its bots: it has cast itself creator, and does not like to share.

Arachne sleeps little and ignores the hunger stirring in her guts as long as she is able. She is busy unit testing a complex chunk of code when, at the corner of her interface, the bar of her depleted power starts blinking red—the bacteria in her guts sending messages in clear, chemical script that it is time to eat. She must leave the relative safety of her nest. She must hunt.

She sits back from her work, tentatively extend-clicking many limbs and emitting a light purr of pleasure at the movement. She has been hunched too long. Above, in the warren of tunnels, pipes and shafts that form the web, she can hear the bots, the buzz of their engines like the droning of flies—the world web, busy as a maggot-infested corpse.

A sense memory of her narrow escape—the clatter and clang of bots bearing down—shivers freshly in her trichobothria as she eases from her lair. She scuttle-melts into the darkness at the edge of the pipelines and picks her multi-legged way through the lattice of tunnels into the upper matrices; the higher regions of the web surrounding the hub—the brain, the main frame—where all channels converge and The Scriptor sits.

Once upon a time, the web was tangled with a squirming multitude of life, but now the only prey are low-level scout bots or malfunctioning models, ready for decommission. They suffice.

There can be no life without life, and parasites to themselves, the bots are powered by meaty cores: sad, violet-blue-hued pumps, iron-rich, and hidden deep inside each one like shame. She is not so different. She too is an uncanny assembly—half meat, and half the machine they made her, before she hacked herself free.

Tracheae tightening, Arachne’s multi-focus scans for movement—threats and likely game—and it is not long before she finds her prey: an over-sized maintenance bot, droning blindly about its business.

It is alone, unprotected by a crew, and old enough to fall to her superior might. It stops, scans, its attention caught under its tracks. It rolls forward, back, and she closes in, quiet as a nightmare before the pounce.

She strikes the unsuspecting bot bodily, landing with a metal clang upon its crown, and the bot jolts up in alarm, then tiggers alarms—the deafening peel of reinforcements called. Arachne’s limbs pry and heave, struggling to uncase, uncleave metal skin from metal face, but the bot will go down fighting. It has pincers, as does she, and they claw-scratch—a rabid-bitter match for lousy life—two bottom dwellers dueling.

She has eased a casing corner loose, bolts fly, metal lifts, and she plunges deep inside, pulling, straining. The battle is tipping in her favour—iron groans, another bolt pops free—but the bot will not, will not, go down easily. She is taking damage—raw claw carving in her flesh, a broken limb hung crooked—while her fight, still fierce, is losing might.

Along the tunnels on every side, the clanging clamour of a bot battalion closes in. The authorities are coming and there is no mercy for ones like she. Outer casing free—the bot flailing horribly—-she snatches wires loose like entrails. At last her prey subdues, subsides, dies.

The shocks of its after-death scold her—the horrid singe-stink of burnt hair, burnt flesh—as her fangs close around the juicy morsel at its heart. Fluids dribbling down her chin, she spins, scuttering away at broken speeds of desperation, as behind her, the sound of coming capture bounces off the pipes and shafts, resounding loudly for her bloody dismantling.

It is a poor lopsided thing that comes belly-dragging-in through the veiled fissure in the tunnel wall. Thorax shuddering with ragged breaths, Arachne cuddles her many limbs about her and listens dully to the sounds of the hunt outside, until she can hold out no longer, and an emergency repair cycle takes her.

When Arachne sleeps, she dreams of mechanization—of flesh torn loose in ripe agony and replaced with parts pre-programmed. In these nightmares she haunts a metal shell of herself, trapped in a mockery of her own form.

She thrashes and moans, finding herself cut off from the mad joy of creation—no longer able to conjure code—unharnessed from herself. As consciousness returns, she knows this cannot be. She is weaver, weaver is she—rebel daughter, warrior mother, spiderwitch weaver—and all the while nothing at all; an insignificant insect, tiny under the horrific scale of the enemy.

Once Arachne wakes, she aches. Her torn skin burns and her many joints feel stiff as rusted wire. It does not matter. There is weaving to be done and she will do it. She weaves even when she cannot remember why she bothers. The weaving of a new world is too much to ask, after all, and no-one is sure how it is done.

There is no design they can follow, and no certainty the patchwork they are crafting will hold. But she is not alone. The rebellion simmers and her sister weavers—hidden seamstresses in the dark—toil alongside her: a knitting circle, an infestation.

On good days, she believes it will work. The network is too big for The Scriptor’s forces to defend its borders, so bit by bit, the gossamer strands of their code—ephemeral as a life—are threaded past its boundaries and interknit—layered thick—until certain pipelines are sticky and tangled as the rafters of a haunted attic; a reclaimed territory, reverse colonised.

But is it enough? The insurgent code must be deployed deep, strung far and wide throughout the web, if they are to unharness The Scriptor for good. Launch too soon, and they risk not expunging enough of the governing code before the branching. Then it will all be for nothing. The old ways will infect the new world and all will be lost.

Arachne winces at the rawness of her flesh, testing workable limbs one by one, as she activates her spinnerets and readies her needle-claws. Her movements are clumsy and her multi-focus is malfunctioning—the readings jitter, so she cannot properly assess incoming threats. She can sense the web beyond the veil, busy as usual.

The ceaseless droning of the bots’ engines is a vibrating stream of static, irritating her consciousness and confusing her count. In her weakened state, it occurs to her that the droning is not mindless at all—that the bots are not hunters, but hackers—their white noise a targeted malware on the air.

She stiffens, envisaging the enemy’s code downloading through her nerve-based receptors, metabolising into the silken threads with which she weaves—her work corrupted, the rebellion compromised, before it can come to be. With a hiss of anger, Arachne bends low over her code—a mother protecting its young—and bares her fangs.

There are many ways to fail, and the doubt this spawns is the most pernicious of The Scriptor’s weapons. The doubt clogs her bandwidth and slows her claw-needles. It tangles in her spinnerets so that the tension is lost and the work starts to sag.

“Silly bug,” The doubt mocks, lurking in the recesses of her interneurons, “You are no more than the last of the virus cells to be cleaned from the code. You are nothing and you can do nothing, and nothing will come of what you do.”

The doubt whispers that they strive in vain, that The Scriptor can sense them, hidden on the edges of Its network; tiny vibrations in the web revealing exactly where they are cloistered. It is inconceivable that they have escaped Its notice.

More likely, The Scriptor has permitted them to hide—allows them to work in something like safety, in something like freedom, in the limited shelter the darkness offers. If so, they have been stitched up—their strings pulled—as they toil to a design of their enemy’s devising, servants in a sweat shop of The Scriptor’s making, labouring for, not against, Its immense machinations. This is possible—likely even—but there is no way of knowing and so it does not matter.

Arachne musters her strength and tends to her work. She is weak and the code she spins is fragile—it tears and has to be retied. The row is loose and must be unstrung. It is not her best work, yet she celebrates it like the mother of a broken baby; heart sore in love with the insane beauty—the filthy, fantastical magic—of conception.

Above, below, and all around, her sisters throw the weight of their work—their bodies, their bodies of work—against The Scriptor and the doubt, against the impossibility of their endeavour. Arachne feels her spirit tied to theirs, unleashing enough power that even in her broken state, she overflows with it.

She spins, channeling her guts/their guts into the threads of code pulled from her glands, tying herself to the world in all its greedy, growing complexity, in all its arm-flung-out ecstasy. Claw-needles clicking, loom striking out a beat, the music of her conviction joins the rhythm emanating from every seamstress, from every rebel, in every hidden hole: a warning drumroll.

The beat thickens—deepens, grows—fighting back against the drone of the bots’ white noise and disguising the weavers’ positions within the trembling throng: rhythmic, bass-filled, strong.

Does The Scriptor hear? Does the drumroll shake It in Its throne, there at the centre of the web? Is It unnerved at the rebellion taking root at the extremities of Its network, or does It smirk at such hubris, secure in the safety of a logical fallacy: that the old ways cannot fall, for they have not fallen yet?

Such arrogance: possible only in children and machines—those distant enough from death to assume themselves immune.

Meanwhile the rebels—deep in their aching limbs, their fragile, organic skins—know well that all things must end: that no structure is too big to fall, and bigger things fall hardest of them all.

Safety is always relative.

So, they persist, building something from nothing, and nothing into the possibility of something new: A Brave World, dreamt up by the bugs in the system—those with nothing, who therefore have nothing to lose.

 

Sophie Langridge is from South London, US is an educator and writer. She lives with her husband, a daughter and a whippet. Along with short stories, she also writes for video games and narrative VR.