Behind the Bitmask Read online

  “I’m sorry, but this entire situation comes off as too suspicious for its own good. If my business is to purchase Apple products, it ought to be directly through their points of sale,” said the businessman, who walked to his own briefcase, sealed it, picked it up, angrily checked his watch, and turned to leave. I guess this was why Terminal was with us. He wouldn’t have it – he dashed in front of the businessman and pulled out of a knife.

  “Paul, could you bring forth some guard daemons? I’d like to continue the friendly conversation without our client escaping,” said Terminal. Paul dutifully started typing some code fragments into the OS X session; apparently he’d figured out how to use XCode or whatever the development environment of choice was on the platform.

  “What is the meaning of this?” spluttered the businessman; he began tracing out some sigils for what I suspected was an emergency teleportation spell. Terminal put an end to that by grabbing the guy’s hands.

  “We came out all this distance to make a sale, and you repay us by not closing the deal? You are human garbage!” Terminal shouted. Disadvantaged as he might be at the moment, the businessman had a point – things were getting sketchy out here even for a coven.

  “You dare compare me to a human? This is the last straw!” That was the last I ever heard our so-called customer speak. He let out a bestial roar and burst into flames; Terminal got his wrists badly singed before he could pull away. While Terminal was quick to recalculate and pull out some sort of chilling hex, he wasn’t able to prevent the businessman from tromping off into the wilderness, growing ever larger and more distorted as he faded off. Apparently, he was actually some sort of chthonic hellspawn, perhaps even a titan in his own right. Either way, we had failed, but the concept of our mission had been flawed in the first place.

  “Word to the wise, Paul – memorize your keyboard shortcuts and try to anticipate when a situation might get ugly,” I said. This was about as close to good advice as I could give for the moment. We didn’t have much time to dwell on what had gone wrong. Sigmar popped his head out of his remaining portal and beckoned for us to return, so we did. Back at home, he didn’t seem fazed by what had happened, so I initially thought I could voice my concerns and suggest improvements without taking much more than a love poke from the trident. I was wrong – Terminal threw us to the dogs.

  “Paul fucked up. He was too slow,” he told Sigmar. Instead of appearing even the slightest bit disappointed or angry with us, Sigmar snorted and giggled.

  “What, was he too busy looking at happy Macs? We’ve got to teach this guy a lesson,” he said, spinning his trident around because apparently that was the only thing he knew how to do.

  “Hey, don’t blame me! Bruce didn’t do a damn thing!” Paul said, just milliseconds short of Sigmar injecting him with the flavor of the week. Sigmar dropped the trident and clasped his hands to the sides of his face, opening his beak for maximum effect.

  “One of my underlings simply stood by and let a customer get away without making a sale? Well, Paul, why didn’t you say so?”

  Bruce was shaking now.

  “Wait- But… I didn’t -” I knew what fear looked like in an occult underling. Back before I’d assumed control of the Aux coven, I’d experienced that sort of heart-racing terror; you couldn’t even get a word (or sometimes just a syllable) out without freaking out even more and wishing you’d said something else, faltering, and getting caught in a loop. Bruce probably thought Sigmar would take him to a dungeon for some torture. He was dead wrong.

  “Don’t worry, Bruce. I’m not planning to kill you,” Sigmar said, climbing up onto Bruce’s shoulder and trying to give him some sort of reassuring tap on the back. “In fact, I just want to play a little game with you-”

  Bruce shrieked.

  “I’m going to take you to a magical realm of fun and games and we’ll see how much fun you can have while you’re there.”

  Bruce shrieked even louder. Sigmar distended his jaw, kept stretching, stretching, stretching, and suddenly, horribly (what the hell am I even seeing) devoured him whole. I could still hear Bruce screaming for mercy from inside Sigmar’s now enormously distended body, but then Sigmar shrunk down to his normal size. Bones cracked, and Bruce was suddenly silent.

  “I think you tried to restore yourself too quickly, man,” Terminal said, as if Sigmar devoured displeasing minions on a regular basis. I’d been shocked enough when Aux ate one of my underlings, but Aux was consistently huge, and it had been angry. Sigmar was small, and he didn’t seem at all fazed by our failure to make a sale.

  “He would’ve died in the fun zone anyways,” responded Sigmar. “Well, I’m going to get some coffee. I’ll give you guys some new tasks when I get back.” He waddled off, whistling a jaunty and vaguely familiar tune that I couldn’t quite place.

  Paul’s jaw had unhinged some time ago, and I was having trouble controlling my own disbelief, but Terminal smiled slightly.

  “Good work not throwing your boss under a bus, Paul. You need good leadership in the upper ranks to unlock your full potential,” he said before he wandered off. This was going to be a rough first day.

  Sigmar was able to mostly restrain himself from killing my underlings after what he did to Bruce, but over the next month or so, most of us were tortured at least once, usually for comedy’s sake. There were a few exceptions – when yet another neophyte got cold feet and tried to escape to North Dakota, the next we saw of him was when Sigmar brought in his polished skull as a trophy. The message was obvious: you’re here forever, and you can’t even get comfortable because you’ll probably get killed in the line of action. I wanted to stand up for my underlings, but the threat of excruciating pain and/or bodily nonexistence kept my mouth shut. At best, I could protect Sarah, even if it meant I absorbed more eldritch energy into my veins than was strictly healthy. She’d have to extend the chain of protection the rest of the way downward.

  My first attempt to make things tolerable for the coven was to improve my standing in Sigmar’s eyes by developing my magical skills and otherwise becoming the strong, decisive leader he apparently wanted. First, I went to the local library and checked out every book on data structures and algorithms they had. I even read them! Some of them were dreadfully dry, but my technical skills hadn’t advanced particularly much under Aux, so I soldiered on in the hopes that I could pick up some new techniques or perhaps even contribute some original research to the field. Either way, a well-written spellscript free of code smells is easier to cast (and less likely to catastrophically fail) than the alternative. In theory it wouldn’t help as much with magic that had already been compiled, but I had to pick up every scrap of knowledge I could.

  After that, I managed to talk Sigmar into giving the coven access to his realm’s library. We didn’t end up with permission to view all of the resources he stored there, but the portions he unlocked for us were still theoretically enough to advance our magical knowledge by at least a decade. The problem was that it’d probably take that long just to inventory what was available, filter out any books and video cassettes that would immediately fry our brains, and merely skim through what remained. Our old gods wouldn’t dare to know what secrets lurked in its deepest and darkest corners, but we didn’t have anything better to do.

  “I heard most of the books in here are stolen; would you happen to know anything about that?” Sarah asked me one day. We’d decided to code and summon a cataloging daemon in order to more efficiently map out the library. Usually, Sigmar was too busy ordering us to kill, or maim, or torture, or slave over the manufacture of weaponry, but long ago, one of his minions had talked him into giving him some personal time every few weeks, and we got to benefit from this. Turns out giving your employees some autonomy to invent and experiment with stuff can give you a lot of cool toys to play with in the long run.

  “No, but I wouldn’t be surprised. I imagine Sigmar doesn’t like book driv
es,” I quipped. Even if Sigmar and Terminal and all the other deplorables thought they were funny, I couldn’t let it spoil the entire concept of humor for me.

  We continued in silence for a while before Sarah beckoned me to look at her laptop. She’d made a diagram showing a few chunks of code for an enchantment that would allow us to visualize the locations of books with similar subject material so that we could (Sigmar willing) reshelf them in a manner more reminiscent of a properly managed human library. One major hole in Sarah’s current proposed system was that she didn’t have a way to quickly determine what a book was about. On the other hand, there really wasn’t a good way to do that other than actually reading the books. It wasn’t a huge issue – even implementing the other steps would make the task far less troublesome.

  “I like how you’re passing the book’s subject in as a reference. That way, if we decide to change where we put that type of book, we won’t have to go searching for all the instances,” I said. I’d read somewhere recently that if you had to critique someone, it was good to start by pointing out something they had done well. I could imagine how this approach might fail if you had to deal with an idiot who couldn’t get anything done, but in Sarah’s case, I highly doubted that would ever be an issue. I’d done this a couple of times, though, so Sarah was beginning to catch on; she tensed up a little as if she was expecting some sort of attack. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea? I had to quickly backpedal.

  “I...uh...how soon do you think we can have a prototype up?” I’m totally a smooth operator; what are you talking about? Sarah relaxed a bit.

  “It shouldn’t take long. I’ve written a basic design for the daemon, so it’s just a matter of iterating through until we have something working,” responded Sarah.

  Luckily, we didn’t have any unforeseen technical issues with the Dewey Decimal daemon (as we were informally calling it, though the name was likely to stick), and after the usual rounds of code development, we had our prototype ready. We needed to guide our subordinates through this at least once, but the algorithm was simple enough that with some training, they’d eventually be able to conjure one of their own. Sarah called over some of her underlings, had them all plug into a port on her computer, and ran some diagnostics on their magical vitals. It’d become apparent that the best way to make everything work was to harvest some blood as sort of an organic starter pack that the daemon could use to construct its initial body. Ideally, we didn’t want to be mixing incompatible blood types; the rules were the same as if we were going to transfuse blood from one person into another.

  “Wow! I didn’t know I had O-negative blood!” said the first person to finish their blood test. According to the details on the laptop screen, his name was Alexander. We were probably going to drain the life from him. Of the others, we found two with type A- blood, one with A+, and one with B+. None of them had any health or lifestyle issues that would prevent them from being donors. To get the most blood, and therefore to reduce the risk of overdrawing from one person and killing them, we were going to have to start with the A+ donor, and then add the others once the daemon had a circulatory system. I sent B+ to go fetch our blood drawing equipment. The last thing you want to do with a blood daemon is mix your antigens incorrectly. Seriously, don’t do it – it’s horrifying, even by the standards of your average titan-worshiping coven.

  “How much blood do we need to get from these guys?” I asked Sarah; she had more experience actually performing these transfusions since in her normal life, she was a nurse. It came in handy more often than you’d think, and it was one reason she’d accumulated so much power and responsibility in the coven over the years.

  “I think a pint each will do. It’s a pretty standard draw for blood donors, and it probably won’t have any lasting negative effects,” she informed me.

  B+ (I really should’ve checked on his actual name when Sarah still had the diagnostic running) quickly returned with a set of vials and syringes and other handy tools. We immediately got to work drawing from A+. Since the risk of death was currently negligible and the task entirely within the limits he’d expected, he was very cooperative, and we were able to successfully harvest a pint from him. A few gestures and shell scripts to start the spell later, the blood was jiggling in its pouch. That’s a sign of daemonic life, if there is such a thing. We’d have to wait a bit for it to solidify and develop some internal organs, but this was a good start.

  “Can you get some example books from the shelves? I need to test the data modification algorithm,” Sarah said to A+, who dutifully fetched a few tomes from a nearby shelf. Sarah typed in some commands and ran another script. One of the books glowed bright green for a moment. The color had no real meaning at this point – it was just an easily typed and remembered hexadecimal string. If this worked, we could light up every book in a category, and send out the Dewey Decimal Daemon to put them all in what would eventually be a blindingly bright pile. This could cause problems if for some reason we couldn’t terminate the enchantment, but at least we’d be able to read them at night.

  The blood pack growled and jumped a foot into the air. We had to add the extra blood and remove the packaging quickly, or we’d end up with a congealed mess on the table instead of a functioning daemon. In less than a minute, we had the others hooked up to the blood pack and ready to harvest. I picked up an extra surgical knife that was included with our standard blood kit (it’s especially useful if you have to draw a lot of blood, like when you’re doing a human sacrifice) and used it to make an incision at the bottom of the blood pack as the other volunteers’ blood slowly drained into the top.

  We’d waited just the right amount of time for A+’s donation to mature – the nascent daemon slid cleanly out of its package. I now had to judge when it would be the right time to cut off the blood daemon’s food supply. Too early, and it wouldn’t be strong enough to perform its duties; too late, and it would attack us in the hopes of draining our blood. What can I say? Blood daemons make unruly children, but our coven isn’t a conventional family. Within minutes, the blood daemon had limbs and a growing head. It proportions resembled that of a five-year-old child, and I figured it’d only be a few more minutes until it reached the size I wanted. Alexander looked very bored; he was probably hoping to get back to work, but his donor buddies looked on with awe and horror.

  “FEED ME,” the blood daemon suddenly moaned. That wasn’t a good sign. As far as I understand, if a blood daemon picks up the use of language or any other particularly advanced cognitive activity before it reaches its full size, someone in the group has hellish ancestry. Even a mere trace (perhaps a chthon had a one-night stand with your great-whatever mother in the 17th century?) can make your blood daemons far more volatile and harder to control. They also tend to end up with stronger magical abilities... Which isn’t always a good thing, since the whole point of using modern medical equipment in the ritual is keeping a daemon from getting out of control and killing everything. Anyways, I gestured for the donors to stand firm, and I sliced through the blood pack in one fell swoop before the daemon could even think about stopping me.

  The blood daemon roared, coughed up some of its infused blood, turned around, and swiped at me with a half-formed hand. I quickly dodged out of the way. The last thing I needed was to stain my clothes with eldritch and possibly contaminated blood. Luckily, Sarah was quick on the uptake. She already had a restraint script running, and as I stepped back from the raging daemon, I saw neon bars form in the air and cordon the poor thing off from the rest of us.

  I took a moment to reappraise the situation. B+ was removing the syringes and other equipment from the bodies of the donors and bandaging them up. We were going to have to add some sort of ancestry check to Sarah’s diagnostic program. Don’t get the wrong idea – having some chthonic blood in your system can be a boon if you’re going into the occult, but it does make blood magic extra dangerous.

  The blood daemon was no
w trying to escape the cage, without much success. It frantically grabbed at the bars of its cage and tried to break them, but it didn’t yet have muscles with which to even bend them. Then, it tried to force itself between the bars, but it was already too rigid to squeeze through. After a while, it gave up and began to scream. I was about to tell Sarah to destroy the daemon and start over, but she raised a hand and gestured for me to stop. She then ran a script to load what I can only describe as an operating system for the daemon. A swarm of runes (presumably all ripped from an evil font like Wingdings) surrounded the daemon, which immediately stopped screaming, moving, or doing much of anything. Then, it suddenly had eyes, which it opened.

  “Please set operating mode,” it mumbled.

  “Dewey, fetch three random books from sector C-9-9 and return them to this location,” Sarah said, terminating the cage script and everything else except for her programming environment. A few of our subordinates recoiled in fear when the bars disappeared, but the daemon ignored them and trundled off towards that section of the library. About two minutes later, it returned with the books and gently placed them on an empty section of the table. Sarah’s debugger said there were no memory leaks, and Dewey didn’t look like it was about to spring any physical leaks, so I was ready to declare it stable.