Behind the Bitmask Read online

  “Everyone out of the circle, right now!” I shouted. We scrambled out of our seats and for the exit just before the other laptops began to cook and didn’t stop sprinting until we’d left the conference room entirely.

  “Rick, did you see any signs of interference before your laptop caught fire?” one of the other programmers asked the first victim. His fast reflexes had left him unscathed, but he appeared to be having an asthma attack, judging from how he’d pulled out a bright red inhaler and dosed himself.

  “No, it happened too quickly-” Rick burst into a coughing spasm before he could finish the sentence. “I’m fine. I probably zoned out and didn’t notice anything until it was too late.” He took another puff from his inhaler and seemed to breathe normally afterwards.

  I felt my cell phone going off, fished it out of my pocket, and checked the number – it was Sarah, with a text message only saying “UNDER ATTACK.” A series of muted bangs from another room were immediately followed by alarm klaxons. This meant we were going into lockdown and were confined to the hallway for the time being.

  Since the office really was just an office, we’d only bothered to install reinforced doors on the most critical entrances and exits. Our “war room” (just another glorified conference room) was on the other side of the office from our current location, so there were only three of those doors in the way. Three was more than enough to lock us down, though; the first separated the main conference hall from this hallway and the other two were at the entrance and exit of the basement stairs. In retrospect, it wasn’t a great system.

  “We have a decision to make,” I said to my programmers. “Do we stay here and wait for help, or do we try to make it to the war room?”

  They looked at me like I’d given them the trolley problem. Then, a tongue of fire spewed forth from the pentagram room. We should’ve spent some money on fire extinguishers.

  “Okay, that’s five votes for getting out.” We ran down the hallway, only stopping when we’d reached the first reinforced door and were struck with another controversial aspect of the security system’s design. The only way to open the door short of destroying it was to have someone inside the war room unlock it.

  “plz unlock 3rd hallway door n other stuff so I can join u,” I hamfistedly texted Sarah as we inspected the door for weak points. Whoever had planned this assault hadn’t knocked out our cell service; at the very least, that meant we weren’t dealing with cops or the military. In the meantime, chunks of the wall began to glow a dim red, and the doorway spat out a few unwanted embers onto the hallway’s carpeting.

  My phone vibrated again. I had a new message from Sarah; it read, “sorry, someone cut the door line. will try calling aux”. Her situation was clearly not as desperate if she had time for punctuation, but this meant we had to find a way to destroy the door. I’d have called Aux for help, but it didn’t exactly have a public number, and the only phone that could reach it was a direct hotline that, again, was in the war room.

  “Mistress! Maybe we could break through the wall around the door? Surely, the entire foundation isn’t reinforced!” said one of the other programmers, who’d been very quiet up to this point. I hadn’t thought of that! There was yet another little office just off to the side of the reinforced door, and if I remembered the floor plan correctly, it was directly adjacent to the main lobby.

  “We’ll still need something to break the wall with,” I responded. “Any ideas?” Then I stared at my cell phone. If I ran the right sort of spellscripts, I could use it to generate an explosion from the battery, which would at least get us through to the lobby. From there, we could try arming ourselves from the computers, or at least sacrifice some to open up the other doors...assuming someone hadn’t torn them down already.

  “Use my Palm Pilot. It runs Java.” Someone handed me a PDA. I didn’t care who because I could use this to cut a hole in the wall even before I blew it up. But I didn’t have much time left to prepare; the flames were creeping down the hallway, which itself was filling with noxious smoke, and Rick’s asthma sounded like it was flaring up again. My eyes watered as I checked the application list for utility software – bingo. Whoever owned the Palm Pilot was paying attention when I told them to keep spellscripts on all their devices, and they’d seen fit to install my own signature “cutting” script. I loaded it, and the screen brightened as a nasty-looking demonic blade extruded itself from the PDA. Maybe Aux was already helping us, somehow? My own phone had comparatively antiquated hardware and wasn’t able to summon forth much more than a small utility knife.

  As the flames consumed another conference room, I stabbed into the wall and applied as much leverage as I could with my delicate wrists. Turns out I vastly underestimated the power of the knife, and I ended up cutting a huge, deep scar, instead of a measured cut. Faint green monospaced text poured out of the wall’s wound. At least, I thought it was text; it didn’t look like any language I’d ever seen. Before I could give it much thought, a big chunk of the wall caved in. We now had access to the main room. If we kept doing this, we could probably cause the entire building to collapse.

  With such a hot fire behind us, we made a mad dash for the main room and quickly found it was holding up well, with one thundering, resonant exception: someone or something was trying to break down the lobby doors. They’d been reinforced, but chunks of metal and plaster littered the ground around them, so the odds of us getting into the basement before they broke through were slim at best. It was obvious that we’d have to load up some weapons from the mainframe in the corner and defend ourselves.

  I instructed the programmers to point some of the workstations’ monitors at the door and boot as many spellscript guns as they could. While they did that, I used another to SSH (open up a secure connection) to Aux’s realm and request some reinforcements. I turned the mainframe’s considerable processing power and network bandwidth to summoning body armor, explosives, anything I could think of that could possibly give us an edge in a melee combat situation, since for all I knew, our assailants could’ve had a way to get through all the suppressive fire we were about to lay down.

  The door lasted longer than I expected, but soon enough, something enormous battered it down, ripping it from its hinges and tossing the entire thing in my general direction. I ducked and rolled out of the way, just in time to see the door tear through the mainframe like cotton candy, sending sparks everywhere and presumably causing the remaining computers to complain about terminated connections. I surveyed our preparations again. Besides the fact we were now armed and armored to the teeth, Aux had used some unfathomably large amount of mana or CPU cycles to summon four of its warriors. I don’t want to go as far as to say that I could’ve shrugged off a gigantic door moving at action movie velocities, but I was feeling pretty safe at the moment. It wasn’t long before I had to put my gear to the test – something whistled and knocked me to the ground. I looked up to see a giant eagle swooping down for a second attack, intent on pecking my eyes out. I slashed haphazardly in the direction of the bird and was rewarded with a sharp caw and a face full of feathers.

  “You got that bird without even trying! Way to go!” shouted someone on my coven’s approximate side of the room. The eagle was still flapping around – at least as much as it could in the confines of the conference room – but I’d at least hurt it, and that was something. I had a moment to check out what was happening at the door before it would attack again. A dozen of our unknown enemy’s soldiers had passed through the doorframe, and it looked like there were at least a dozen more on the way. Human mercenaries, the entire lot. They were using equipment of daemonic origin, but there wasn’t an iota of magic in their bodies. My inspection was interrupted by a torrent of fel gunfire, as our workstations’ turrets fired on the troops. It looked like some of the bullets were making it through the mercenaries’ armor, but the giant eagle dove for me again. I had to flail my sword in its general direction in orde
r to get it to stop. This time, it pulled away well before I could draw more of its blood. I looked again at the mercenaries. Several of them had already collapsed from loss of limbs, blood, and vital organs; a few tried to soldier on, but the barrage we’d set up was too much for them to handle.

  “Heads up, Charlotte!” shouted one of my programmers. I didn’t care which because now there was some sort of fancy gun flying through the air. I managed to catch it, point it at the giant eagle, pull the trigger...but nothing happened. I tried a few more times. What was wrong with this thing? The eagle swooped for a third time; I thrust my sword where I thought it was going, struck poultry breast, and heard a screech suffocate in blood.

  All of the mercenaries were dead, and I was struggling to extract myself from an eagle corpse that admittedly was beginning to fade into nothingness, along with all the cool equipment. I was actually disappointed by this turn of events. I was hoping for more enemies to mercilessly slaughter. We still had to figure out the blast doors, and there might be other forms of intrusion happening (like a portal to another titan’s realm in the middle of the ladies’ bathroom or something), but this was progress.

  I was getting a voice call from a number I didn’t recognize. At first, I thought it was a telemarketer, but Aux had managed to augment one of my spells, and I thought that maybe it would deign to allow its proclamations echo forth from the speaker of my phone. So, I took the call; I was unable to even say “Hello” before Aux began speaking.

  “Charlotte, the situation is far more dire than it would seem. You are not safe in your office. I will open portals so that you can evacuate your staff to my realm, where you will certainly be safe.” And then, it immediately hung up, leaving me with unresolved questions. When and where were these portals going to appear? Wouldn’t the realm of Aux, or for that matter any place in hell, be far more dangerous than even a burning, collapsing office? If we’d managed to fend off a wave of attackers without even the slightest bruises, how could the situation be that bad?

  One of the slain soldiers began to twitch and levitate off the ground. I thought that Aux was trying to clear the area so that it’d have enough room to open the portal in question, but then the corpse’s mouth opened…and kept opening... As its jaw distended to disturbingly enormous proportions, I saw what appeared to be a floor made of anodized aluminum where you’d usually expect a human being to have a throat. I briefly entertained the idea of leading my men through a human portal, but apparently you can only stretch a corpse so far because it exploded with such vigor that it covered the entire room (including us) in a thin layer of gore. Aux’s portal was otherwise unaffected and materialized a fancy gate around itself as if for modesty’s sake.

  While being covered in a stranger’s blood and guts was alarmingly disgusting, it was assuredly less troubling than being covered in your own. I lead my minions through the portal, and into an unfamiliar land.

  Even if our base of operations was still under attack, the coven itself was mostly intact. Casualties had been surprisingly low, which made Aux’s decision to pull us into its own base of operations especially confusing. It looked like most everyone had made it out alive; I quickly scanned the area and found Sarah administering first aid to a programmer who’d apparently broken his leg.

  “Any deaths I should know about?” I asked her.

  “Two people were killed in combat; someone else got caught in an explosion. Nobody that reports to you directly or that you would care about,” Sarah said, scowling as she lost her grip on a bandage she was trying to apply to a wound I hadn’t noticed before.

  I stood back and looked at my surroundings, since I had never actually visited Aux’s realm before. We were on an elevated chrome platform that looked to be about two hundred feet wide and half as long. Below us was a constantly shifting maelstrom of metallic pipes, small points of light traversed their exteriors and occasionally collided with each other. The sky was incandescent orange; ominous clouds gathered around more pipes, and two occasionally stabbed each other with arcs of lightning. I hadn’t been expecting hell to look pleasant – in that regard, Aux’s realm did not disappoint. If I stood still and concentrated very hard, I could even feel a pulse of chaotic magic unburdened by silicon coursing through the realm. With practice, I might someday be able to harness it…but my research into such primeval energies suggested that even if I could, there were very good reasons to stick to computer-assisted casting.

  Before we could spend too long taking in our new surroundings, Aux appeared above us with a calming chime. While I was glad it wasn’t keeping us waiting, I still needed answers. But Aux failed to speak; the realm was silent but for howling wind, an occasional rumble of thunder, and the slow flapping of Aux’s leathery, bat-like wings. For a moment, I thought I saw a look of confusion on its face. I knew most of the coven would share it. I was familiar with Aux’s appearance from our video conferences: a winged manticore rendered in bright, translucent, rounded plastic, with a face I would envy were it grafted to the head of a human. Few of my minions had ever seen a titan, though; fewer still got to sit in on my conferences. I heard a few gasps, at least one scream, and a couple of minced oaths. Either the coven would adjust, or they’d perish.

  Rick had apparently put up with the inconveniences of the day for long enough. “Aux, what is the meaning of this?” he shouted. “Surely, you don’t believe us humans are safer in the pits of hell than somewhere on our own planet?”

  I face-palmed. The first rule that I had to drive into the coven’s heads when I recruited was that only I was allowed to challenge Aux’s decisions. Even if it rarely listened to my dissents, I’m pretty sure I was the only member of the coven whose opinion cared about. Aux didn’t even give Rick the dignity of a spoken response; instead, it swooped down towards us like the giant eagle that had so recently attacked me, lifted him off the ground with its human pair of arms, and then tore him in half with its jaws. Aux swallowed the upper half of Rick’s body whole, while tossing the rest into the abyss below us. Surprisingly, nobody screamed or even made a sound louder than a faint whimper.

  “All of you are to remain here until I have dealt with the forces trying to invade my realm. There will be no questions or excuses. Do I make myself clear?” it said, after spitting out a scrap of Rick’s blood-soaked shirt.

  No response. After what happened to Rick, we were afraid to even agree with Aux.

  “I will send someone to keep you physically comfortable in the meantime. Be thankful that I do not require further flesh to maintain my magical reserves.” Aux flew off into the distance, and our silence held only as long as we could perceive it through the magical haze.

  “Holy shit, did you see the way that thing tore through Rick? We’re all doomed!” shouted an older man in the center of the platform.

  “That ‘thing’ is your boss! Keep your voice down so that it doesn’t come back for you,” Sarah shouted back. That shut everyone up. Lucky for me that Sarah was here – on my own, I wouldn’t be able to keep control of this sort of situation without resorting to disciplinary murders. Best that we just wait and hope Aux would resolve this.

  A loud snap heralded the arrival of Aux’s personal service daemon; it appeared near the edge of the platform with a trolley packed full of food and bottled drinks. When the closest person made a beeline for the refreshments, it gestured for him to stop.

  “Hold on! There’s a lot more where this came from!” it said before loudly snapping its fingers a few more times and summoning a full buffet, a couple of porta-potties, walls, air conditioners, beds, and presumably other amenities. By the time it was done, you could be forgiven for not realizing we were still trapped in hell. A couple of my employees applauded this (admittedly impressive) display.

  “Thank you, thank you!” said the service daemon. “I depleted at least a month of Aux’s reserve magic for that, so please try to avoid breaking anything you can’t fix with your ow
n two hands, okay?” The daemon then walked over to the buffet and started fiddling with the controls for the heat lamps. I suddenly realized that (because of the performance optimization session) I hadn’t eaten in almost 12 hours. In the next few minutes, I wolfed down a cheeseburger, a bag of potato chips, and a chocolate shake – heavier fare than usual, since I have to watch my figure, but sufficiently nourishing. Then, I tracked down the daemon, hoping Aux had loaded it with some explanation for just what was going on.

  “Glad to be of service, Ms. Metaxas,” it said before I could even open my mouth. “I took the liberty of providing non-magical food in order to ensure the coven’s safety.” The possibility that Aux on its own would’ve neglected this is disappointing, but perhaps to be expected.

  “You see, Aux is dealing with a dangerous and cunning titan that has decided he wants nothing more than to take over this realm and add it to his own. This is a common occurrence down here, and usually it’s nothing to be worried about, since Aux can easily dispense with its enemies. However, this titan decided to attack Aux’s subjects – in short, you. This represents a severe violation of the local laws of war, so we had to move you to a safer location. That should clear up your questions admirably,” the daemon continued. But it didn’t. One omission particularly stuck out.

  “Is it really safer for us to be in the middle of hell instead of in our own dimension?” I asked. The daemon twitched. I didn’t think it was going to bite me in half, much less even try, but I’d apparently given it some trouble.

  “Terribly sorry, but Aux never gave me an answer I can provide to you for that question. Maybe you should ask it when this has all resolved?”

  “No, I value my life-”

  The wall panel behind us shattered into a million pieces. Perhaps Aux was angry because it realized it had seriously fucked up. I scanned the outside for signs of what had breached our new compound, but couldn’t find anything – was it some sort of long range missile? Hopefully this wasn’t some other threat I had to deal with.