Corvallis was flying pretty incompetently now, as old and disused parts of his brain were grinding into movement: rust rimes cracking, dust and cobwebs flying into the air. He couldn’t do that and, at the same time, with the same neurons, trim his virtual wings in simulated currents of air, so he came in for a crash-landing on his steel perch.

Then he thought about what Solly had just said.

“Well, sure!” he finally answered. “Cruft is forever. If you peel back the layers that have grown on top of other layers, and keep delving, and grep deep enough, you’re going to find base code that was written by some Linux geek in the 1980s or something. File system primitives. Memory allocation routines that were made to run on hacked single-core IBM PCs that had never heard of the Internet.”

“Old incantations having the arcane force of magic,” Enoch said.

“If you say so. I haven’t touched anything like that in decades. If it’s magic you’re after, I know some AIs—”

“You overestimate the difficulty of what we have in mind,” Enoch said.

“I’ll bite. Though I don’t have teeth. What do you have in mind?”

“Copying a file.”

“That’s it!?” he squawked. But he was already feeling a mild sense of unease, wondering whether he could even remember the Unix command line incantation for anything as simple as copying a file. Systems nowadays didn’t even have files in the old sense. They had abstractions that were so complicated they could almost pass the Turing test on their own, but still with a few old file-like characteristics for backward compatibility.

To cover that unease, he blustered. Not a Corvallis behavior, but he had become part crow. “Why do we need to call a physical meeting for that?”

“It’s an important file. Both here and . . . where you are going next.”

“Is it huge? Complicated? Damaged and in need of repair?”

“It is small as these things go, and perfectly intact,” Enoch demurred.

“It’s a key,” Solly blurted out. “A cryptographic key. With an avatar.”

“Should be simple enough, I’d think,” Corvallis said. “What does the avatar look like?”

“A great big fucking key, that’s what it looks like,” Solly said. “Distinctive. One of a kind.”

“Until I copy it.”

“You know what I mean. Not something you want to leave lying around in the open. Hide it.”

“Should I ask how you came into possession of this key?” Corvallis asked, beginning to get the drift.

“No,” Enoch said.

“Is it on servers belonging to . . . someone else?”

“It was copied from servers like the ones you’re thinking of,” Enoch said, “and now needs to be copied once more if it is to pass fully into your control. We think you might be needing it.”

“Oh, my god!” C-plus exclaimed. “Is this the One—”

“Don’t even say it,” Enoch commanded.