Behind the Bitmask Read online

  “Down here, lady!” said something that, when I looked down, turned out be exactly where it claimed to be. What was I looking at? It was about a foot tall (walking on its hind legs) and covered in soft brown fur. It was carrying a black trident at least as tall as it was, even after you accounted for its horned red hood. It also had a beak – because evolution and intelligent design couldn’t agree on who got to design this world’s creatures. Was this platypus creature the titan that sought to violate the daemonic equivalent of the Geneva Conventions?

  “You know, Aux will probably realize I’ve figured out your hiding place in a few seconds. You think he’ll get here faster if I kill all of you?” said the new titan. I was expecting a squeakier voice, but instead, it (he?) sounded like a tenor. Maybe the pitch was a little high. Looking at him was only filling me with a sense of impending doom.

  “Sigmar! What is the meaning of this? You would dare to assault my followers when I am still unscathed?” With a cascade of wings, Aux had returned – and just in time. I’d only just met Sigmar, but I already knew I didn’t want to have to persuade him to spare us. Maybe now, I wouldn’t have to.

  “I was considering it. I thought you’d punish me if I’d actually killed someone, so I wanted to get your permission first,” said Sigmar, hoisting his trident a little higher. Aux was so angry that its body was beginning to glow ruby red.

  “You are by far the most infantile being I will ever have to dispatch! You will gain nothing from attacking my minions, but an even more agonizing death!” it shouted.

  “What, you mean like this?” Sigmar lightly poked me with the trident; I immediately lost all feeling in my body and collapsed on the ground. A couple of people screamed in horror and presumably rushed towards me, but I heard what sounded like thunderclaps, followed by what sounded like bodies hitting the ground. Aux shouted something unintelligible.

  “Oh, grow up! Your humans will be fine in a minute or so. I didn’t actually hurt them.” As far as I could tell, I wasn’t dead, so maybe Sigmar had a point. On the other hand, I was still incapable of voluntary movement – I could breathe and blink, but that was about it.

  Sigmar was still yammering on. “Anyways, I’d love to keep playing games, but I need your employees alive and safe.” He pointed to me with that accursed trident, luckily not poking me with it a second time.

  “I am absolutely done with this outrage! Sigmar, you will engage me in personal combat, I will defeat you in order to gain the claim to your land, and then I shall devour you to gain your strength. Is that clear?” Aux shouted, and some sort of magical hell storm began to coalesce around its body. I was impressed with this display of magic power, at least from an aesthetic stance, but Sigmar just giggled.

  “Who wants to see me humiliate this guy?” he said. No response, but Sigmar didn’t care; he pole-vaulted at least 50 feet into the air with his trident and soared up to meet Aux.

  My vantage point wasn’t the best since nobody had bothered to prop up my immobilized body, but I felt like I had a good grasp on what each combatant had to do in order to triumph. If Sigmar remained small and didn’t mess with his size (which wasn’t a guarantee), he would probably be able to run circles around Aux; then it’d be easy for him to attack whatever Aux’s weak points were without fear of retaliation. Aux could mitigate this to some extent by surrounding itself with destructive energy – more along the lines of carpet bombing in comparison to Sigmar’s dog-fighting prowess. On the other hand, titans are unpredictable fighters, so everything I said could easily be wrong.

  And then it was wrong, because Aux cupped its arms together and launched an unending stream of spikes at Sigmar. Sigmar dodged these with little effort and was soon behind Aux, who flipped around so fast, I could barely parse it, while still firing spikes in Sigmar’s general direction. This continued on for some time, but Sigmar soon grew tired of dodging the barrage and started spinning his trident, expertly deflecting the stream in every direction except those that would’ve hit Aux or the increasingly anxious coven. Then, Aux smiled and snapped its fingers. The spikes surrounded Sigmar and began to close in ominously; Aux promptly ruined its credibility by laughing maniacally at its apparent triumph. When you celebrate an impending victory, it is bound to be taken away from you in the most humiliating fashion possible. For that very reason (as far as I’m concerned), Aux’s cage of spikes spontaneously vanished into nothingness with little more than a quiet pop, leaving Sigmar completely intact to blow a raspberry at his opponent.

  “Alright, I’ve had my fun,” Sigmar said. He brushed his palms together, and then threw his trident at Aux, who didn’t even try to dodge it, and just stared menacingly at Sigmar as the trident pierced its torso and burrowed in about half its length. Sigmar returned the stare, and nothing happened for about a minute. Then, a huge, lime green gout of magical energy burst out of Aux’s thigh. Another erupted from its chest, and a third blew its head clean off. Aux’s wings kept beating for a few moments, and then what remained of its body dropped out of the sky. I heard someone to the side clapping and had nearly stood up to see who it was before I realized I was able to move again. I glared at this person until they stopped.

  “Oh, dear. I appear to have stopped receiving orders,” said the service daemon. Before anyone could respond, Sigmar flew back into our compound; he finally seemed to notice that he couldn’t account for his trident and summoned a new one by snapping his fingers. Everyone else took a few steps back towards the other walls. I heard someone trip and fall, but I was too busy watching Sigmar to see who. He didn’t immediately single out whoever it was for a dreadful fate, so I’d say he was doing better than even I would in his situation. For whatever reason, Sigmar then turned to Aux’s service daemon, who I noticed still seemed to exist, although in a rather more nonplussed and confused mood than before.

  “I thought you were going to rush to the aid of your master, but no, you just had to stand off in the corner,” Sigmar quipped, running a finger over the service daemon. “What, were you hoping to have a personal duel with me?”

  “I-” it tried to respond.

  “Oh, wait. You’re harmless. You couldn’t even hurt a mosquito if it bit you!” Sigmar interrupted, cackling like a madman.

  “You are correct, Sigmar. Any sort of combat prowess would defeat the purpose of my programming. Therefore, I have none.” It must take a great deal of courage to admit such vulnerability.

  “You know what? You’re not worth killing. Go take a vacation or something. I don’t care what you do. Nobody in their right mind would try to kill you, that’s how irrelevant you are.” The service daemon shrugged and popped into nothingness, presumably retreating to its own private realm to reconsider its life. Sigmar, on the other hand, turned to us.

  “All of you worked for Aux, right? Now, you work for me. If you don’t like it, I’ll give you the same treatment I gave Aux,” Sigmar explained, without even so much as a boast or taunt. Maybe he actually had hit his fun quota for the day. I was still shocked by how easily Sigmar had obliterated Aux, so this wasn’t really the time for a life or death ultimatum. On the other hand, I wanted to keep on living, and I suspected that if I marketed myself just right, Sigmar could push my occult powers and programming skills to unprecedented levels.

  “We choose life, Sigmar,” I responded. Yet again, there were a few gasps and curses – a clear sign of dissent if there was any. “Please disregard any signs you might see or hear to the contrary. I’ll deal with them myself,” I continued. Sigmar gave me a thumbs up and hefted the trident again.

  “That’s great! I’m glad to see that you’re being more reasonable than your former superior. That’s always a good thing to have in a- PSYCHE!” He rushed up to me and poked me with the trident yet again. I collapsed to the floor without immediately dying for the second time that day. Right? Suddenly, everything seemed dark and distant.

  “Ain’t I a real stinker? Neve
r cared much for copyright law, either,” I heard Sigmar say before the darkness took over completely. I’m surprised I woke up again, much less in our ravaged office; Sarah later told me that Sigmar had spent about an hour pranking the coven before sending us through a portal and telling us to go home for the night. Working for the platypus was going to be challenging at best.

  “One more thing before I head out, Charlotte,” she said to me. “You know how Aux once told us our communications ports bound us to its life force and that if it died, we would all die?”

  “We’re not dead yet,” I responded. It hadn’t occurred to me until now, but I was in fact able to recognize my own...aliveness.

  “I think Aux may have lied about the link. Based on my own studies, I’m beginning to think even a titan can’t cast that sort of magic.”

  That was something to think about, but maybe later, when I’d gotten some real sleep.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” - Exodus 22:18

  Aux, in retrospect, had been a very isolated titan. It had never ventured into the human realm for obvious security reasons, but for many years, it had refused to even pay lip service to our rapidly advancing culture and technology. At some point in the 1970s, our illustrious (but nameless) founder had broken into its realm by botching an experimental military teleportation project. Aux had nearly slaughtered him right then, but he’d struck a devil’s bargain: a cult of fanatically loyal worshipers in return for not exposing Aux’s cruel realm to humanity’s even crueler machinations. That had worked out pretty well for a few years.

  Then the facade of secrecy broke down, allowing people like myself to try their hands at titan worship. I’d heard our origin story second-hand from my predecessor as leader of the coven, Edgar Atkinson, who was older and crustier than stale bread and whose personality was about as appealing. He’d cut his teeth writing games for the Commodore 64 and stuck with the industry until the late 1990s. He was a decent guy once you got to know him, although he did tend to mock me whenever my spellscripts used more than a megabyte or so of RAM. I don’t know why he disappeared, nor do I know if Aux had somehow given its blessing, but he stopped showing up for work one day, and out of a few possible successors (one of whom disappeared in mysterious circumstances), Aux had decided I was to take charge. After that, things went well, and I was hoping to expand and improve on operations as the years went by.

  Then Sigmar had gibbed Aux, and I was certain the entire system would collapse there and then.

  Luckily for me, Sigmar inherited the coven. Instead of reporting to Aux, I now reported to him. My goals were nominally the same as before – advance my boss’s agenda, receive magical knowledge in return. I was hoping he’d introduce a money economy at some point, but for the moment, keeping the status quo (and therefore reducing casualties) was important. So, I treated my first shift under Sigmar like any other day. I put on nice clothes for my day job, crunched some numbers, drove back home to slip into something more evocative and also to darken my makeup, and headed to the coven office. Someone had been working overtime to repair the damage of Sigmar’s attack. Most of the damaged computers had been replaced, and the shattered chips and wiring from the rest had been cleaned up. All the doors were back on their hinges and surrounded by appropriate types of walls. The horrific stench of burnt electronics was mostly gone, as well; a few air fresheners in strategic places would probably take care of the rest.

  Some of my underlings had arrived before me, and I discovered the first problem – Sigmar was here to torment them in person. So far, he’d paralyzed three of them, most likely with his trident. Upon seeing me, Sigmar stabbed a fourth minion with the trident and (judging from the crackling sounds) pumped hellfire through his veins. I’d not heard such shrieks of agony in a long time, and I’m surprised that the guy didn’t immediately die.

  “Looks like your boss has arrived! Playtime’s over,” Sigmar said, ripping the trident out of my underling’s arm. A small puff of flame burst forth from one of the stab wounds, and my underling slowly got up and limped away. Maybe it was a good thing I was never the first person in this office – who knows what sort of tortures Sigmar might visit upon me in the name of fun and games? Best not to think about it too much.

  “What sort of services are you looking for, Sigmar?” I asked, hoping to get a straight answer. Luckily, he responded with words instead of weapons.

  “Today, you’re selling Mac OS X!” responded Sigmar. “I’ve got this thing going where each session of OS X running in the world gives me a dose of magical power, and I could always go for more of that.”

  We were doing sales? Not a particularly glorious beginning.

  “Don’t get the wrong idea, though,” he continued. “I’m sending along some muscle so you don’t have to tell anyone to think different, or any of that nonsense. We’re not going corporate just yet.”

  After I’d set myself up with a briefcase full of electronics (including a special sales laptop) and spellbooks, Sigmar brought me over to a portal he’d set up in the corner of the office and told me to wait there as he fetched the rest of my team for the day. He ended up assigning two unknowns I’d barely talked to and one of his own employees – a tall, thin man with long dark hair and a twitchy disposition. I guessed he wasn’t very good at shaving or at growing facial hair as his cheeks and neck were covered in thin, but highly noticeable stubble.

  “This is Terminal,” Sigmar explained as he gestured to his underling with his trident. “Before you ask, I don’t know his birth name, but I like him. He can make stuff explode and melt with only a few lines of code, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s killed more people than I have!” Terminal sneered at this.

  “Well, you know your people, so no need for further introductions. Off you go! The portal will take you to your customer,” Sigmar said. We clambered into it before Sigmar could do something horrible to us and were promptly somewhere new. I needed to correct the stranger problem quickly.

  “Okay, I actually don’t know who any of you are. Can we go through a round of introductions so we know what we’re bringing to the table?” I asked. My unknown underlings were clearly disappointed, but Sigmar hadn’t started messing with the hierarchy yet, so there were probably lot of layers of management between me and them. One of them opened their mouth to speak, but Terminal cut them off.

  “So glad you would ask!” he shouted. “I am the justice in this world, the one who brings death to the worthy and devastation to all who oppose me. I can kill anything, I can unlock the screams from their dirty souls, I have mastery of the fine arts of murder, and I’m very much given to hyperbole!”

  Dead silence. If I had to guess, Terminal had killed it.

  “I’m Paul,” muttered one of my underlings after a while, hands behind his back and shoes scuffing against the ground. “I’m a summoner.” It wasn’t nearly as impressive...or stupid, but it got the job done.

  “My name is Bruce, and I specialize in casting mind-altering hexes on people,” said the other one.

  With everyone’s names established, it was time to see where we’d ended up. I’d noticed that we didn’t appear to be indoors, so I looked up and saw the sky was blood red. We were standing in a field of brown dirt that extended as far as the eye could see. No buildings, no visible changes in elevation. In short, some forsaken, desolate, uninhabited part of hell, just waiting for a mad mind to shape it into something worse, but not quite so bad just yet. I began to wonder if you could (with sufficient irrigation) grow crops here. Unfortunately, Sigmar wasn’t paying me to plan colonies. What else was I going to do, pay attention to the job? I assumed our clients would arrive soon, but the minutes began to pile on.

  “Where are they?” Terminal whined. “I hope Sigmar didn’t give them the wrong coordinates. He does that occasionally-”

  And then, “they” arrived; a lime green portal appeared and
disgorged a very uptight businessman. He did not look at all happy to be here, especially after his portal disappeared into nothingness, but his suit was impeccable and very fashionable, so as far as I was concerned, he had his priorities straight.

  “Are you the ones with whom I am to negotiate a purchase of computer operating software?” he asked as he lowered his briefcase to the ground and opened it up to reveal bundles of dollar bills.

  “That would be us,” I responded. I realized I didn’t really have a comparable display of boxed software or anything else I could show him. I looked at my entourage – my underlings shrugged, but Terminal pointed at the briefcase and mimed opening up a laptop, so that’s what I did. Pretty soon I had another problem. This wasn’t Apple hardware! How was I supposed to coax OS X out of this system? What was our customer going to think? I still dutifully booted up the laptop and was immediately surprised when it made a startup chime. FreeBSD doesn’t do that without BIOS trickery. One Happy Mac later, we were somehow in Mac OS X land. It was clear Sigmar’s duel with Aux had barely scratched the surface of his dark powers.

  “Is there any reason you’ve decided to demonstrate the Macintosh operating system on a computer not manufactured for Apple?” the man asked in a voice he probably thought was authoritative and perhaps even threatening. I didn’t have the heart to tell him he was too high pitched and nasally to even come close.

  “Believe me, the functionality you would be getting is exactly the same. Allow me to demonstrate,” responded Terminal in a crude mockery of our customer’s voice. I had my doubts about the effectiveness of this strategy.

  If you were the type who used their computer for visual/audio design or other “creative” tasks and weren’t planning to program for an audience outside the Apple bubble, it was probably fine. On the other hand, Mac OS X did have a Unix backbone under the surface, so unlike Apple’s earlier versions of the system, I could theoretically get some use out of it. The customer didn’t seem very impressed by what we had to offer, but I was having trouble placing what exactly was bothering him. Then a gust of wind blew some dust into my eyes, and I remembered that we were out in the middle of nowhere, when we could’ve probably closed the deal by now had Sigmar allowed us to transact in our office. Apparently, this was too much for our customer.