“Well, not exactly. Some areas are more magical than others. There are dead zones all through the Wild Wood, for instance. And at times you can produce something like a magical drain effect and some resources become scarce. Wiz did that in his attack on the City of Night.” It was his turn to frown. “But that kind of thing is rare. There’s an awful lot of available magic out there.”
Taj nodded. “Makes sense. If you’re really resource constrained it’s hard to get any kind of complex development. You get the equivalent of lichens and algae. If there’s no constraint you lose a potent driver for evolution. But if there’s a lot of resources before you hit the constraints…” he shrugged.
“Jeez,” Jerry muttered.
“Okay, now suppose that these things are out there, these little spells, competing for resources. It becomes survival of the fittest. The things that can grab the most resources and hold on to them best survive longest.”
“And we started that?”
Taj pursed his lips. “Actually that probably pre-dates you. I suspect that’s where this world’s naturally occurring demons and such come from. What you added were code fragments that made it easier for pieces to combine.”
“So we are responsible.”
“Law of nature, man. You can’t do just one thing. Anyway, eventually this proto-evolutionary process turns out our friend the glue-on.” He nodded toward the desktop where the virus sat. Jerry thought it didn’t look like anyone’s friend, but before he could say that, Taj was off again. “Now you throw in something like this recombinant virus and the things that survive are the ones that get reproduced.”
He shrugged, “Kind of like an artificial life version of Core Wars, only we’re in the core.” He laughed. “Evolution in action. I’ll bet by now there’s a whole ecology out there.”
“Wonderful,” groaned Jerry.
“That too,” Taj agreed, obviously having missed his tone. The big question is how high a lambda have you got?”
“Lambda?”
“Information mutability. If information is hard to change you stifle any kind of evolution. If it’s too easy to change self-organization doesn’t have a chance. There’s a fairly narrow band where A-life is possible.”
Jerry thought about that. He didn’t like it, but it made sense. “We know some areas are less magical than others. The whole place around the City of Night is an especially magically active zone. Plus there’s a lot of leftover magic down there from the days of the Dark League.”
“And we have kept scant watch there,” Bal-Simba rumbled. “My fault, I am afraid.”
“So,” Taj said, “these things had the equivalent of a petri dish where they could grow and evolve. And now you’ve got something that’s looking to spread out.”
“Why is it so hostile?”
“Because that’s the way it evolved. Maybe it gives the thing an edge in surviving, maybe it’s an accidental characteristic, like something it picked up along the way.”
“Point is, that it’s out there and that’s the most likely explanation for what’s going on here.” Taj shook his head. “Boy, what the guys at the Santa Fe Institute wouldn’t give to see this.”
“What we wouldn’t give to see the last of it,” Jerry retorted “The real question is how do we stop it?”
“Now that,” said the Tajmanian Devil, “is going to take a little thought.”
“More strangeness, Lord.”
Bal-Simba had had about all the strangeness he could stand in the last few weeks, but he forbore to say so to the chief Watcher. “What and where?” he asked.
Erus, the head of the watchers, was a lean gray-haired man with a broken beak of a nose and fierce blue eyes. Years of stooping over a scrying crystal had left him with a permanent slouch.
“Where is to the south, out over the Freshened Sea. As to what…” He shrugged. They travel in groups, and they seek darkness or clouds, but each day they range further north.”
Bal-Simba grunted. “Enough of both at this time of the year, what with long nights and winter storms over the Freshened Sea. You say you have never encountered them before. What are they most like?”
Erus hesitated. Like most of those in his line of work he disliked making guesses, but for him as for all of them guessing was part of the job. “Lord, they appear to be ridden dragons, at least for the most part.”