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Chapter 46

Back at the office, Jack stared at his printer again. The situation was getting pretty ridiculous. He really did need to make printouts, and he needed them to be reliable. No one else in the building had their own personal gremlin, much less a gargoyle. Rhea had seemed so sure that the Hellspawn would leave him alone, and he'd figured if she made the comment, it must have been because she had some experience with the problem; if she ever ventured an opinion, she could always back it up with facts and experience. But she'd been wrong this time. He hadn't mentioned it, though—she had enough on her mind, and he didn't want her thinking he was trying to show her up. And nobody knew much about the Hellraised. He would just have to find an engineering solution. Printer Degremlinization. If he came up with something really snappy, maybe he could publish.

He sat down and pondered. He didn't really have the time to fool around with it, but on the other hand, could he afford not to?

He accessed the World Wide Web and pulled up the Unchained home page. Someone at the NC State anthro department had started it a year ago, pulling together all the net's resources concerning the denizens of Hell both in myth and reality. Jack sifted through screenful after screenful, pausing only to mark links he wanted to come back to. A lot of the information came from the Unchained themselves, and was notoriously unreliable and contradictory, but that didn't mean it wasn't helpful in its own way.

The sun was low on the horizon when he brought back all the links he had flagged and put them on screen side by side. Belief and religious symbols: That was one common element to the driving out of demons. Jack rubbed his chin and felt the rasp of five o'clock shadow. He had to meet Rhea for supper—and other things—soon, but maybe he had something here. Christianity, Judaism and Islam all had a tradition of successful confrontations with Hellspawn, as long as the confronter believed in the symbols of his faith. Doubtless there was some crossover from vampiric lore, and the indications for faiths not derived from Judaism were less clear, but the indications were there. The symbols alone weren't enough, though; there had been several instances of the Unchained infiltrating churches and even posing as ministers since they came to the state.

Jack sighed. He'd been reared High Church Episcopal, but these days he tended more towards a sort of agnostic deism, the Unchaining notwithstanding. He didn't think he could muster the necessary sincerity to do a successful exorcism on his printer.

He closed out the web viewer, then sat back, struck by a thought. Maybe it didn't matter who or what did the believing. Artificial intelligence was a lot like power from nuclear fusion: it was always twenty years in the future. There were isolated islands of success, though, like neural nets—circuit arrays that exhibited what could only be termed patterns of learning, or, perhaps, belief.

He walked over to his parts shelf. He ought to have a few net chips; they were useful in fuzzy logic controllers. He found one, hiding under the obsolete husk of a Pentium. It was harder to find the programming interface box—that was in the popcorn maker tucked away on the top shelf. He took it and plugged it into his workstation's interface bus, thought for a minute, then keyed in a short multi-entity scenario. He created a container entity representing his lab, with two smaller entities inside, one representing the gremlin, and one representing the neural net chip. He put the chip in learn mode and ran a training sequence over and over, one where the arrival of the chip in the room inevitably resulted in the gremlin's leaving.

While the sequence was running, he mounted a boilerplate driver circuit board and a small battery on a cruciform T-square. When he figured the chip was as convinced as it was going to get, he popped it from the programming box and into the socket on his makeshift cross. He flipped a microswitch and the small power LED lit. Jack struck a dramatic pose holding the assembly in front of him, and began to approach his printer. He was surprised at how uncomfortable he felt. Apparently his parents had imprinted him more deeply than he had thought, or maybe it was one thing to have doubts about religion and another to use its symbols cynically. He shrugged the feeling off and touched the cross to the printer. The gremlin popped out, but it didn't run. Instead it leaped and grabbed the T-square, sprawling across it until it looked like a Catholic crucifix. It closed its eyes, and moaned. It didn't seem to be distressed, though. As far as Jack could see, it was in some kind of feeding frenzy.

He was too confounded to drop the square as the gremlin writhed there in ecstasy. After the first throes died down, it opened its eyes, put two fingers in its mouth and gave a shrill whistle. Instantly two more gremlims appeared on the printer with small pops of displaced air. "I keep money, yes?" the gremlin, his gremlin, shrilled. The other two nodded, and the original beckoned with an arm gesture. The new arrivals jumped to join the first like grade-school looters at a candy store.

Jack had had enough. He shook the T-square to dislodge the gremlins, but they were holding on too tightly. He reached gingerly through the seething mass of small limbs and plucked the battery from the driver board. The writhing stopped, and his gremlin gave him a sour look and the finger. It dropped back into the workings of the printer; the other two scurried for the corners of the office.

Jack looked at the T-square. "Great, Halloran," he said to himself, "just great. Now you've got three of them." There were other uses of symbols and belief in the demonic tradition, perverse uses. He might just as well have mounted the cross upside down and lit black candles. His radio came on suddenly, tuned to a station he particularly hated. He walked over and pulled the plug. He didn't think he was going to mention this little incident to Rhea or anyone else for a long, long time.

He was in the parking lot before the thought penetrated: the little gremlin had said, I keep money?

What on Earth did that mean?

 

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Framed