Behind the Bitmask Read online

  I realized that I was plotting a deicide. Sure, waiting for the one fatal slip up that would cause Sigmar to kill me was one level of foolishly bold, but this took the cake. I did not want to imagine what would happen if Sigmar found out, or if I failed. But no matter what I did, murdering Sigmar called out to me ever more clearly and intensively. With titans out of the picture, we could finally take complete control of the coven. I didn’t know what I’d do with my freedom once I’d liberated myself, but I hoped I could figure something out once Sigmar was gone once and for all. Was this really what I needed to do to keep myself alive? No matter how you slice it, this was going to be a long and arduous process.

  “My actual name? I will never tell you, and you will sooner die choking on your own entrails than that a single syllable of it should escape your lips-”

  Was he still going on about his super secret, super cool identity? I’d never even asked. If I ever got on Terminal’s bad side (or worse side, since at the moment he seemed pretty reprehensible), his insufferable attitude would kill me long before he started plotting my death. I tried to tune out the unimportant bits of what he was saying, so I could focus on acquiring his services. Terminal was allegedly the best assassin in the entire industry; at the very least, he’d managed to convince the underworld that was the case. I’d have expected that would earn him a grand coalition of enemies, and perhaps even angry mobs with pitchforks following him wherever he went…but maybe he’d killed all of them, allowing him to kill even more people in peace. His body count didn’t lie.

  When I first visited him, Terminal was playing an old-looking video game that unsurprisingly involved more killing. He told me it was called Blood, and that at only seven years old, it was far from ancient, even if the rapid march of computer technology had left it looking antiquated. Either Terminal had a very bad habit of going on tangents, or everything he did was an attempt to get a reaction out of me. It was getting harder to tell.

  “You know,” he said, “I went through a period a few years back where I was, for reasons unknown to myself, actually interested in non-violent video games. I’m not sure what happened inside my head, but it seems to have passed. I’m back to normal now, trust me.”

  What exactly is normal for Terminal? I had killed, tortured, and mutilated my share of people as part of my job, but I liked to avoid it when it wasn’t necessary, since murderers, or murderesses (hello!), tend to either draw the wrath of the populace or find themselves having to do ever more terrible things in an attempt to hide their crimes. Terminal, however, had managed to overflow reality’s most wanted meter by amassing a body count generally associated with rogue states instead of individuals. His (nominal) allegiance to Sigmar was the equivalent of giving a small child a loaded handgun – it’s bad enough that they might harm themselves or someone else by misusing it, but what if you manage to properly explain to the kid what they could do with the gun? You have to avoid empowering people who see the world in black and white.

  I’ll be damned if Terminal’s asides don’t inspire my own.

  “Sorry for taking up so much of your time with my insipid boasting. You seem to have more insight into causality than most of the people who seek to hire me. I mean, you’re a witch, and you cause things to happen with magic,” he said. I sure hoped that meant he was done with his shtick.

  “If I might ask,” which he... did, “why do you go by ‘Ada’ on our BBS, anyways? ‘Mistress’ is a much cooler nickname.” Apparently, he wasn’t done yet.

  “It’s for much the same reason you call yourself Terminal. I needed an alias for the internet that reflected something of my background and my values without revealing my identity, and what better option than to name myself after Ada Lovelace, the first woman to write a computer program?” I’d been working on that explanation for some time in case my coven ever asked why I sometimes went by that name, but they’d never had the courage to ask.

  “You know, you could’ve just saved us some time by saying you were stupid when you were twelve. I would’ve believed that. I was twelve and stupid once,” Terminal said. I’m guessing the story needed some work.

  “Anyways,” he continued, “I don’t think you would’ve come here if you didn’t want someone very dead, very fast. Who is it?” There was no getting around it – if all the hints Terminal had given me about being his own man who didn’t actually bow to anyone (even an exceptionally dangerous and cunning titan) were lies, I wouldn’t even have time to consider how I would end up dying.

  “This room isn’t bugged or anything, right? The last thing I want is Sigmar hearing about whom I want dead,” I asked, just to make extra sure that if I did die, I would at least have the dignity of not being killed by my boss.

  “If it were, Sigmar would already be here. Believe me, he has godawful security and surveillance practices.”

  “Good, because I need your assistance in killing him,” I finally told Terminal. After a brief moment of silence, he burst out laughing and fell to the floor. As far as I was concerned, that was worse than a “no”.

  “It’s not that I can’t do it, or that I won’t,” he gasped, in between fits of laughter, “but how in hell are you going to afford my services for a job that big?”

  I hadn’t really thought about that. First of all, I had no idea how much Terminal charged in the first place. Then, my accountant’s salary didn’t pay me enough to hire elite assassins, especially since so much of it went into my wardrobe. Still, I had a few tricks up my especially wide sleeves. I waited for him to stop laughing before trying anything.

  “You know, besides money, I have other assets,” I said once he’d regained some semblance of self-control.

  “That’s another pretty good joke. I’ve got a succubus girlfriend, though, so I’m going to have to say no.”

  Damn! His mind went straight into the gutter. I was hoping he’d be interested in some of the spellbooks and magical batteries I’d pilfered from Sigmar’s library. It was probably my fault for using such suggestive phrasing. But then an idea hit me.

  “You know, Sigmar is exceedingly wealthy, at least by titan standards. If you knocked him off, you could easily secure a big chunk of his treasure for yourself and never have to worry about wanting anything again.”

  That sucked all the fun out of Terminal; he actually looked dangerously angry now.

  “Charlotte, do you know how many people have come to me claiming that they’ll pay me an exorbitant amount of money after I do their dirty work for them? I used to believe them, but they never followed through with the payments. They’re all like, ‘What are you going to do, Terminal? Are you going to kill me?’ Somehow, the fact I could actually end their cowardly lives never enters into their thought process. Then they die for obvious reasons, and its really hard to get my just reward when all their assets are going to their family-”

  “Okay, I get it! You don’t trust me to not betray you once Sigmar’s dead,” I stammered. Surely that was what he actually meant?

  “No. In fact, such an offer constitutes a grievous insult, and now I must exact my price in advance.” Terminal paused his game and slowly reached for an ornate dagger he had lying near his computer. I had to attack first, somehow, but I didn’t have any weapons on hand or spells charged or- Was he laughing at me again?

  “You freak out so easily! I’m not going to kill you. But if you want me to bump off Sigmar, I’m going to need a lot of money in advance,” he said, tossing the dagger behind him without even turning to look at me. It embedded itself perfectly into the wall, just above a table with some audio CDs. I fixated for a second on one called Couperin Starfish and the Handel Flavored Water by a band named Bachbreaker and immediately thought less of myself for doing so.

  “Two million dollars.”

  Terminal seemed to share Sigmar’s predilection for jokes; in fact, he probably attended all of Sigmar’s Looney Tunes screenings. I couldn
’t possibly appeal to that, but I had one more idea that I was hoping would at least reduce the steep asking price.

  “Why do you even give Sigmar the time of day? Don’t you just want to rip his stupid little demon hood off and show it to him before he dies?” I asked, since if appealing to Terminal’s hunger for violence didn’t yield any results, then I was completely out of my league.

  “Well... I wouldn’t mind doing it. But first, I want to try my hands at throwing a really exorbitant party. I’ve never done it before, you know. Sigmar’s actually pretty dangerous, so I want to make sure I’ve had some fun before I go risking my life.”

  Terminal sighed. Screams blasted from his speakers as he’d just set an enemy in his game on fire with a flare gun.

  “Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give you a fifty percent discount since you seem like an upstanding citizen. I can probably put together a decent debacle for a single million. Come back if you ever raise the cash.”

  So I left, enriched with a price tag, but at the same time impoverished by the mere idea of taking on that much debt. Where was I going to get a million dollars? It’d take me twenty years just to earn that much from my job, and with Sigmar’s onerous requirements, I wasn’t going to be able to put in the work to get a raise. In the meantime, I still needed some minions outside the coven to take a few blows in case Sigmar turned out to be as lethal as Terminal seemed to think he was. Even if I abandoned the assassination for some reason, they might come in handy for other nasty coven work. Between my work for Aux and my work for Sigmar, I’d put together a small list of daemonic contacts who could hopefully get me in contact with others who wanted Sigmar dead. These I called from the comfort of my own home – I cleared out some space in the kitchen, drew a pentagram on the counter, and set my laptop up with an autodialer so I could summon and negotiate terms as I made dinner.

  “Are you the being who summoned me?” said my first choice, as the pentagram glowed an eerie green and their visage appeared in what appeared to be smoke. I hoped that the smoke wouldn’t get in the vegetable mix I was stir-frying on the stove.

  “Nope, you’re looking for the potatoes. Do you understand why I summoned you?” I responded. Snark wouldn’t fly too high in hell, but when a dimension separated us, I could afford to be a little cheeky, and I didn’t really want to deal with someone who couldn’t take the occasional joke.

  “The message you sent claims you wish to hire me for some unspecified violence and perhaps torture, and that you’re willing to pay five thousand human dollars for my services. Is that an accurate representation of what you want?”

  I guess this chthon didn’t so much take the occasional joke as deflect it entirely. On the other hand, he seemed like a decent enough guy, at least for a cold-blooded killer from another dimension. We were able to hammer out a contract very quickly. Then, I referred him to Terminal for further instructions.

  “Did you ever try seasoning your vegetable mixture with Parmesan cheese? It adds an impressive depth of flavor,” the chthon offered before the smoke forming its avatar lost cohesion and drifted desperately towards my kitchen’s fire alarm. I thought about the food suggestion, and tried it on a whim. It was great! I knew a good meal would help me make better plans, and if I wanted to kill Sigmar, I absolutely needed them.

  What’s the best way to make money? Take money! I still had some ethical qualms about the robbery I was about to pull off, but you have to understand how pretty much everything is better than working for Sigmar. Besides, I was only going to take a million dollars; I’d read up on it and it looked like the FDIC would cover such a loss like it was a drop in a bucket. I wanted to take more and spend some of it on myself, but the last rational bits of me knew that if I gave myself enough to matter, I’d have a lot of extra explaining/laundering to do when the time came to do my taxes. Best just to let Terminal handle it; he seems to think he’s above the law, anyways. Being the skilled sorceress and computer scientist that I am, I knew that I need not pull on a ski mask and wave a gun around in public in order to liberate money from a bank. Best to leave that to the small-time crooks.

  In order to cover my tracks a bit, I drove out about ten miles, looking for unsecured public WiFi networks that I could leech off without making myself too conspicuous. I found one emanating out of a nice quiet library that otherwise hadn’t quite caught up with the multimedia revolution. As part of my deception, I went to the nonfiction section and picked up some thick tomes off the shelf. The subject didn’t matter; they just had to look difficult and obscure so I could pretend I was a grad student doing research for a PhD or something. Despite trying not to care, I still noticed that I’d chosen books on ancient Greek mythology and history. Nationalistic fervor, perhaps? My mother, at least, was very proud of her Greek heritage and always tried to impress on me that I was somehow the scion of a noble race renowned for its cultural achievements, even if her methods were limited to feeding her family a lot of olives and feta cheese.

  I opened up my backpack and took out some hacking gear. One thing I had going for me was the work laptop Sigmar’s minions had provided for me. It was bulky and had awful battery life, but it performed very nicely when plugged in and notably had some cutting edge error correcting code memory, which is good for that extra kick of stability when the occult gets involved. It was also very easy to get around Sigmar’s attempts at monitoring my behavior. While I had to run a FreeBSD partition at work loaded with all sorts of spyware (who knew they made keyloggers specifically for FreeBSD?), Sigmar didn’t seem to care what I used when I was off the clock, so I was quick to install a special magician’s Linux distro (ThaumOS, based off Debian) on a hidden partition that was only accessible if I stuck a USB stick in at boot time. Why Sigmar didn’t have me using something similar at work was beyond me.

  So, I plugged my laptop in and quietly booted it up – flash stick in to make sure GRUB knew how to find ThaumOS on my laptop’s hard drive, flash stick out so I could keep it concealed afterwards. I had my work cut out for me. I had to encrypt as much of my traffic as possible, open up a connection to Sigmar’s magical batteries so that I didn’t have to cast much in public, activate a couple of terminal sessions to run spellscripts as needed. It was a quick process, and I was soon looking at the front page of the Nebraska Savings and Financial Company. They weren’t enormous, but they had a lot of wealthy clients, good insurance, and terrible security.

  No banking company that I’m aware of would be stupid enough to actually make their fiscal servers available from their public home page, and the fact they were still in business meant that Nebraska Savings was no exception, much as I would’ve preferred that they were. What I needed was some sort of official contact information – an address, a phone number, even an email address would do the trick. It was simply a focus for my first spellscript, which was designed to lock onto the magical essence of a corporation and find their computers. This didn’t require much concentration or power from my end, but my convoluted subterfuge and encryption slowed things to a near crawl. It would take at least ten minutes to locate the server farm. In the meantime, I busied myself by setting up more diagnostics. ThaumOS is stable and cautious enough that running out of memory isn’t going to bring forth the daemon horde, but I still needed to keep track of how intensively I was using my computer in order to stay safe.

  While I waited, I idly opened up one of the mythology books to a random page. A lurid illustration of “Saturn Devouring His Son” greeted me, and I quickly flipped the page, looking for something less distracting. Nebraska Savings’ financial server turned out to be located in the same building/vault as the one running their public page. The next step was to magically tunnel in and force the machine to accept my connection.

  Here was an opportunity to put my task manager to use – on Earth, servers usually don’t move around. Now that I’d made a note of the server’s location in meatspace (and on the internet), I could terminate the
geolocator script, leaving ThaumOS more resources to break through the bank’s security. The financial server wasn’t expecting communications requests from anything that didn’t look and smell sufficiently like another bank or governmental finance system, so forcing a connection was a question of spoofing a legitimate request as closely as possible. I’d studied what kind of messages bank servers sent each other during my preparation for this task, so I had a good idea of what to do.

  As I prepped the fake request, I noticed that I’d turned to a page describing Zeus sneaking into Cronus’ court in order to poison him. This book was becoming extremely problematic, so I closed it and opened up another one, which turned out to be about a fellow named Alcibiades and his exploits in the Peloponnesian War. I found myself rooting for the Athenians before I realized I still had a heist to pull.

  I sent my sequence of banking-themed messages to the financial server, and after jumping through its many hoops and layers of inquiry, I was in. The text and symbols of an old mainframe awaited me. Nebraska Savings and Loans’ internal analysts had their fiscal experience mediated by fancy graphics and a mouse-driven interface; if they saw the bare metal underlying it, they’d know they were peering into a higher reality. That’s fine, really. The bank thought I wanted to run some automated transactions, and machines certainly can’t appreciate a snappy-looking user interface. They prefer a sequence of clear instructions, and to that end I had the power of Unix on my side.

  Like any ultimately Unix-derived OS, ThaumOS lets you string together programs on the fly with a few convenient keystrokes. For instance, you can use a greater-than sign (>) to write the output of a command to a file, or a vertical bar (|) to pass the output of a command to another command. On its own, this isn’t exactly programming, but you can easily string a series of commands together to build new functionality out of existing software. All of this chaining and currying meant I could fetch people’s fiscal records en masse and then force the laptop to barf out neatly formatted and sorted tables, allowing me to see who was fool enough to store their assets in this bank, how much money they’d put in, and therefore what sort of thefts I could get away with.