A mortal wound for the university, but the university was already mortally wounded. This was the only way to prevent the Worm from seizing the entire computer within the next week or so. Virgil's insight had been that although the Worm had been designed to take into account any conceivable action on the Computing Center's part, it had not anticipated the possibility that someone might destroy all the records and dismantle the Operator simply to fight the Worm.
The Worm's message to Virgil had been the key: it had identified him as an employee of the Computing Center, a hired hit man. That was not an unreasonable assumption, considering Virgil's power. But it was wrong anyway, proving that the Worm could only take into account reasonably predictable events. The downfall of the university wasn't predictable, at least not to sociopath Paul Bennett, so he hadn't foreseen that anyone would take Virgil's pyrrhic approach.
Virgil now had enough processing power to run a large airline or a small developing country. The Worm could only loop back and start over and try to retake what it had lost, and this time against a much more formidable foe. So on hummed the CPU of the Janus 64, spending one picosecond performing a task for the Worm, the next a task for Virgil. The opponents met and mingled on the central chip of the CPU, which evenhandedly did the work of both at once, impassively computing out its own fate. Fred Fine noticed that no one could sign on now except Virgil, and concluded the obvious: Virgil was the Prophet of Shekondar, the Mage. So we saw little of Virgil, who had absorbed himself completely in the computer, who mumbled in machine language as he stirred his soup and spent fifteen hours a day sitting alone before the black triangular obelisk staring at endless columns of numbers.
Sarah, Hyacinth, Lucy and friends showed up late in the evening of the First, giddy and triumphant, and we had a delighted reunion. Ephraim Klein showed up at five in the morning bleeding from many small birdshot wounds, moving with incredible endurance for such a small, unhealthy-looking person. After establishing that the shot in his legs was steel, not lead, we sent him to Nirvana on laughing gas and generic beer and sucked out the balls with a large electromagnet. Casimir turned up suddenly, late on April second, slipping in so quietly that he seemed just to beam down. He dumped a load of clothing and sporting gear on a bench and set to work in a white creative heat we did not care to disturb.
"I told you," Ephraim said to Sarah, as he recovered. "We should blow this place up. Look what's happened."
"Yeah," said Sarah, "it's a bad situation."
"Bad situation! A fucking war! How many other universities do you know where a civil war closes off the academic year?" Sarah shrugged. "Not too many."
"So why do you think we're having one? These people are a totally normal cross-section of the population, caught in a giant building that drives them crazy."
"Okay. Lie down and stop moving around so much, okay?" She wandered around the shop watching a goggled Casimir slice into a fencing mask with a plate grinder. In one corner, Hyacinth was teaching the joys of Bunsen-burner cuisine to a small child who had been caught up in the fighting and sent down here by grace of the Red Cross. Sarah suddenly walked back to Ephraim.
"You're wrong," she said. "It's nothing to do with the Plex. What people do isn't determined by where they live. It happens to be their damned fault. They decided to watch TV instead of thinking when they were in high school. They decided to take blow-off courses and drink beer instead of reading and trying to learn something. They decided to chicken out and be intolerant bastards instead of being openminded, and finally they decided to go along with their buddies and do things that were terribly wrong when there was no reason they had to. Anyone who hurts someone else decides to hurt them, goes out of their way to do it."
"But the pressures! The social pressures here are irresistible. How…"
"I resisted them. You resisted them. The fact that it's hard to be a good person doesn't excuse going along and being an asshole. If they can't overcome their own fear of being unusual, it's not my fault, because any idiot ought to be able to see that if he just acts reasonably and makes a point of not hurting others, he'll be happier."
"You don't even have to try to hurt people here. The place forces it on you. You can't sit up in bed without waking up your goddamn neighbor. You can't take a shower without sucking off the hot water and freezing the next one down. You can't go to eat without making the people behind you wait a little longer, and even by eating the food you increase the amount they have to make, and decrease the quality."
"That's all crap! That's the way life is, Ephraim. It has nothing to do with the architecture of the Plex."