Behind the Bitmask Read online

  And you know what happened? The glove repaired itself. It also fused to my skin, with a disconcerting tingle and a tightening sensation that began to creep up my arm. I almost had another meltdown right then and there, but it looked fine, and I was able to use the afflicted hand without any mobility issues, so I went to the symphony with Mr. Violinist and had a nice time listening to music, eating gourmet chocolate, and socializing with the locals, many of whom did what my date wouldn’t and complimented my exquisite outfit. It turns out he didn’t really care that much about how much effort I’d put into dolling up, which incidentally is one of the reasons I ended up dumping him. He also didn’t notice that my glove hand was getting exquisitely itchy, to the point I was scratching and tugging at it by the time the orchestra got to his beloved double violin concerto.

  When I got back to my dorm, the glove was beginning to hurt, and I was afraid my entire arm was going to fall off or somehow poison me. Luckily, my roommate Tracey had arrived from her night out at a sports bar with a bunch of students from the computer science department, returning full of nachos and pale ale. I explained the situation to her as clearly and calmly as I could (I prostrated myself on my knees and begged her to help me and keep it a secret, since I’d gotten the admittedly odd notion that computer magic could get you expelled from college). She looked at me, looked at my computer, and closed the terminal running my script with two keys: Ctrl and C.

  “Always know how to stop a spell. This is the first rule of magic,” she said to me, as if girls in fancy dresses came to her for help undressing all the time. The glove fell apart again, and I flung it to the ground in horror, revealing an intact hand (if one drenched in sweat from fear and poor ventilation).

  “Oh my God, I thought I was going to die like this, and I had no idea what the people in the department would think-” Words continued to tumble haphazardly out of my mouth. I’m certain I was hyperventilating.

  “Breathe, Charlotte. You’re going to be fine.” Tracey put her hands on my shoulders – she had a habit of doing that when I freaked out about grades or studying or whatever was stressful in my life. It often helped, but it took me about a minute to stabilize my body.

  “I had a feeling you’d come around on the computer magic someday,” Tracey continued, “but you really have to make sure you understand how your spells work. Otherwise, you won’t even be able to cast them.”

  “I read the code. I even fixed some typos in it! I was sure it’d be okay.”

  “Yeah, but it was still someone else’s code. It takes a while to really grok what they mean.” The peer review I had to do as part of my schoolwork could attest to that.

  “You know a lot about this stuff,” I muttered. I was still trying to parse what had happened.

  “I’m a computer science major. I find it helps to be aware of how magic works.”

  I stared at Tracey for a moment. How had I not picked up on her affinity for the occult?

  “You know, I think you should take some time to learn the fundamentals of magic. I could teach you,” she continued.

  My first spell was born of fear and desperation, and it had nearly been a complete success, but for my panic attack. I almost convinced myself I would never dabble in magic again, but then I reconsidered – what if I gave it a second chance? What if I could wield magic for my own gain, just by knowing how to program a computer?

  The very thought derailed my life in an instant. On the surface, I was still the young, enthusiastic, pretty girl finishing up her last semester of accounting classes, but I spent ever more of my time delving into magic – initially under Tracey’s supervision. In retrospect, things didn’t really get out of hand until we graduated and went our separate ways (she got a job at Apple working on Mac OS X), but that’s another story.

  “We’ve got a problem, Charlotte. The law already wants to know what became of Clint Powell,” Sarah said to me the next day. She pointed to a security camera feed from the entrance to our building, where two cops were standing impatiently, waiting to be buzzed in. For Aux’s sake – I was trying to get Clint out of my mind, and now some petty policemen wanted to pry into coven business?

  It wasn’t going to be my first encounter with the police. As a younger and more naive Charlotte, I spent nights fretting over whether my forays into the occult among the Aux coven were going to earn me a life in prison. If the rumors about our USB ports were true, that would make for a very short life that would end once Aux fed a spell of destruction into the magical link we were supposed to have. When I found myself free of police harassment or incarceration, though, I began to investigate just what was concealing us from a world that was still getting used to the existence of magic. Beyond our vows of secrecy, the tales of ritual violence and sexual depravity potential defectors could tell are usually pretty far-fetched and hard to follow up on compared to actual gang warfare and corporate espionage in the less savory parts of Minneapolis.

  But when just one guy quietly disappears in the night, that’s when the long arm of the law starts groping you.

  “Okay, let’s get it out of the way. Are the police in on Aux’s...side hustle?” I asked, shuddering at the thought of how badly this could go wrong.

  “I really couldn’t tell you.”

  “Let’s roll.” We made our way to the entrance of our building. It was still early in the night – if we dealt with this in a timely fashion, it’d give us more time to tackle the other half of the Powell problem: how are we going to make more soldiers?

  Time to actually face the police. The office has something of a lobby, admittedly filled with busy servers and other electronics, so we deposited the police there before we took any serious questions. Luckily, there were only two, but my usual instinct (sacrifice them like pigs!) wasn’t going to do me any good here.

  “You on your way to a costume party or something, lady?” the first officer asked me, and I immediately felt bile rising in my throat. This lady could not possibly know the first thing about how a coven works! Most of my disposable income goes into clothes and cosmetics, and at least half of that is earmarked for fancy outfits I can wear to influence my underlings. Without this, my control over the coven would be tenuous at best.

  “Look, we’re trying to run a business here. If you could tell us what we need to do, it would be greatly appreciated,” said Sarah before I could chew out the impudent policewoman.

  “Oh, you’re the woman I talked to on the phone!” said the second officer. He almost smiled, but then tried to contort his face to make it look serious. “We just need to ask some questions and maybe look around to fill out a typical missing persons report.”

  I would rather deal with the second officer than the first. It’s a shame they come in pairs.

  “George, are you taking this seriously? I’m getting a bad vibe from this place,” the first officer said to her partner. My murderous stare seemed to be having some effect.

  “Okay, okay, fine! We’re here to ask if you’ve seen Clint Powell recently. He apparently took a night shift job here.”

  What kind of description is “night shift job” in the depths of our dungeons? During the day, I work as an accountant and bide my time until I can return here to practice the occult arts, but if there’s one thing that Aux doesn’t understand at all, it’s money. If only I could teach Aux the fine points of how a business works! Until then, I have to stick with accounting. It’s not bad, and I’m good with the numbers, but that’s 40 hours every week spent not being here to program. Some people would argue that the macros in Microsoft Excel count as programming. I know this for a fact because we once dragged one of their advocates into the dungeon, carved regular expressions into their flesh, and then bloodily dismembered them. It was fun.

  In my reverie, I noticed Sarah had commandeered the interrogation, promising to get any information the coven’s HR department (which doesn’t exist) could provide on Clint�
��s habits and in-office behavior. This was probably going to be enough for George, but the other officer was returning my stare now.

  “That’s what it is!” she suddenly exclaimed. “I have some chthons deep in my family tree, and I’ve inherited a sensitivity to magic. This place is overrun with magical energy!”

  I tried not to scowl, but at least for a split second, I failed.

  “Between that and all the computers, I’m pretty sure there’s something unsavory happening here.”

  George didn’t look convinced by his partner’s accusations. Maybe we were still in the clear? “Michelle, I don’t think they’re keeping a lot of tabs on their employees’ personal lives, “he said. It just doesn’t seem like that sort of company.”

  If only George knew what he was getting into... But then, he might rat us out to the police, and Aux would have to pull strings in the mayor’s office again.

  Finding out about that was also a shock. Turns out that among other things, Aux supports the municipal government of Minneapolis against its political opponents. I’m not entirely sure how it started, or what it entails, but I have participated in the occasional ritual to weave foul, healthcare-subsidizing magicks. As far as I know, this has helped keep us under the radar. But what happens if the world at large finds out about the mayor’s deal with Aux? That’s what keeps me up at night these days.

  “We’re very big on the whole ‘people over policy’ techniques that are spreading through the corporate world. Trying to exert too much control over our employees will just make them leave for other employers,” Sarah responded. I think she saw more opportunity in convincing George that nothing was up than stopping Michelle.

  “I like that! It’s probably because I work in law enforcement, but our policies mean mountains of paperwork,” said George. Sarah gave him a knowing grin.

  “I know what that’s like. Is there anything else you guys need from us?”

  Michelle scowled at us, but George shook his head at her. This looked to be some sort of seniority issue. I didn’t like a smart, perceptive lady like Michelle getting overruled by her dolt of a supervisor. That happens to me enough at work, even when I pull up my skirt a few inches in an attempt to be...extra persuasive. I’m sure it sounds degrading, but Michelle didn’t even have that luxury as a cop. As much as I wanted to keep sympathizing for her plight, I also needed to get her out before she convinced George to give us a proper inspection.

  “We’ll call first if anything comes up,” George said. “Please forgive Michelle. Everyone’s buying daemon-powered fridges and washing machines these days, and it sets her off.” He gestured for Michelle to follow him to the office exit, and she begrudgingly followed him. Sarah and I were now alone in the lobby.

  “A laundry daemon? That sounds extraordinarily ill-advised,” Sarah said to me.

  “I’m not gonna judge. But we have to find a way to keep Michelle from coming back and snooping around.”

  Sarah shrugged. “Last thing we need is a rogue detective, but what are we going to do? Don’t say kill her-”

  “Damn it!”

  But that’s the thing – Sarah was right. We couldn’t afford to kill Michelle, especially not after she’d visited what even we thought was a pretty dangerous lode of magical power. We stared at each other in silent thought for a while.

  “No ideas?” I asked after a while.

  “Nothing good,” she said. “I’m just glad I defused the other guy before he could figure anything out.”

  I promised Sarah I’d think it over during the next few days, and she did the same. But it only took one. On the way to my “real” job, I passed a car that had clearly been vandalized by some sort of local criminal, and I had a flash of inspiration I had to sit on all day at work.

  “Let’s pay some thug to smash up Michelle’s car! She’ll be so busy dealing with whoever did it to care about us,” I explained to Sarah that next day.

  “I don’t know, Charlotte. That sounds convoluted,” she responded. At least she wasn’t saying it was immoral. I’ve occasionally had underlings who didn’t understand that we essentially gave up our claim to morality when we joined a coven. They shape up or drop out.

  “Got any better ideas?” I asked. Sarah stared at me for a moment, and then shrugged.

  “I wish I did. I’ll check our contacts.”

  And that was that. The police didn’t bother to visit us in the next few days, so I wrote off their inquiry into Clint Powell’s horrific fate. It didn’t really calm my nerves – the daemon we’d made from his body stood guard in one of our most trafficked hallways for an entire week before Aux stopped dragging its feet and summoned the creation into its own realm. Every glance at its vacuous smile sent shivers down my spine. At least Sarah was busy modifying my initial burst of code to support the purpose built empty bodies Aux started sending us; I had more important things to worry about.

  I kept having this strange dream… I wake up in the middle of the day absolutely certain that I have overslept. I have no way to justify my inevitable tardiness at work, but no matter what I do, I can’t muster even the slightest urge to get ready for the day. Nobody seems to care that I’m not following my usual routine. A sharp ringing grabs my attention, and what do you know? Now, I’m actually awake! Damned alarm.

  Compared to me, though, my underlings seemed to be reporting terrifying nightmares at an elevated rate, and I wasn’t sure what’s agitating them. I’ve seen some horrifying things (more often than not, I perpetuate them, and more often than not, they are coding horrors) in my service with Aux, but they never seem to cross over into the realm of dreams. Instead, I usually dream about things like oversleeping and eating porridge. I read somewhere that dreams offer us a chance to escape reality, but to be honest, I’m not interested in escapism these days. Spellscripting is a dangerous lifestyle, but it’s worth it. I have powers you couldn’t even imagine before the 3rd millennium rolled over!

  ...Okay, maybe I’m not entirely uninterested in escape from reality. If I could earn a decent living from my occult practices, I would probably quit my day job and be a full-time queen of the underworld. More chances to hone my abilities and reach the next level of mastery over magic. I haven’t really considered what to do with my skills beyond helping Aux, but maybe at some point, probably after a few more years of dedicated study, we can convince it to help the coven take over Minnesota. Maybe I could rule the state as my personal fief, or at least as legitimately-elected governor who listens to the needs of the state and hopes to create a rational political consensus from the disparate political threads of the citizenry. Does that sound too fanciful? I’m still young. I could go all sorts of places. I would certainly be more a more reliable ally of magic than our current governor.

  Unfortunately, my powers do not and may never include peering into the minds of the coven. If only there were some sort of website where people could share their innermost feelings without a second thought...which sounds awfully like Friendster, now that I think about it. In lieu of that, I need to consult with my immediate subordinates. so I obviously went to Sarah McGeer. She was poring over some pictures on her laptop that, on closer inspection, depicted her newborn daughter, Henrietta. Sarah’s newest kid was only a few months old, but she was growing fast and would probably start walking and talking before we knew it.

  “Henrietta’s doing well, I take it?” I asked her. This was an icebreaking technique I’d picked up a while back – people tended to enjoy talking about their children for some reason. Maybe I’ll understand one day, if I become a mother.

  “She babbles like a politician these days,” Sarah responded and put the stack of pictures down. “This is very unlike you, Charlotte. You don’t usually ask me about my kids. Are you expecting?”

  “Uh...” I stumbled. I gulped a little and sat down, rather unsteadily.

  “I’m not pregnant!” I finally insisted. “
Too many of the coven have been having intense and suspiciously similar dreams lately. What’s up with that?”

  “Oh, that. They’ve been complaining to me about it for a while. I don’t know that frequent nightmares really mean anything if you’re an occultist.” Sarah grabbed a nail file out of her purse and started working on her hands. Not sure why – they looked fine to me.

  “Well, I don’t have nightmares very often, not even these days. Maybe if I eat too much before bedtime...”

  Sarah didn’t respond. She touched the file to the screen of her laptop and typed in some commands. The display rippled unpleasantly where the file was touching it, the file glowed bright green for a second, and when she let go of it, it remained suspended in the air. Sarah then placed her left hand next to the laptop – the nail file followed it and took over the grooming for her. Neat trick, but potentially dangerous if you forget to close the script when you’re done or stop paying attention to your hands.

  “Of all people! Not even after what you did to Clint?”

  “I’ve never been a bookworm, Sarah.” She ignored this last bit.

  “So, Harry and David came in yesterday, claiming they’d had a horrible dream about being paralyzed by the venom of some vicious animal. I realized that I’d had the same nightmare! It must’ve taken at least fifteen minutes for my husband to console me last time,” explained Sarah.

  “Did you have to link with their computers the day before or something? That’s my guess,” I responded.