Behind the Bitmask

by Jessica Kagan

  “Don’t shoot! I was forced into this! They kidnapped my family and told me to worship Amdahl or they’d kill them-” blabbed the second cultist. That sounded awfully contrived, and I’d nearly been burnt by nominally-peaceful denizens of hell before, so I kept my gun pointed at him. He responded with a low rumble and a pungent stench, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me.

  “I’m just going to throw this switch over here, okay? Don’t try to stop me,” I told the cultist. It was surprisingly hard to find the balance between keeping casual and keeping a gun aimed and ready to fire in case he was lying, especially since I didn’t want to lose my street cred by slamming into a wall. Eventually, though, I made it over to the switch. I used my other hand to call up Hector.

  “I just reached the switch. How are Azure and Hax doing?” I asked him.

  “We’ve all been waiting for you for two minutes. My men fended off the back attack. Casualties were in our favor.” Hector snarked. Damn! I guess I was happy to hear they’d achieved their goal, but they were probably going to mock my sluggish pace for years to come.

  “Before we pull the switches, I’ve got a bystander here who shat their pants and claims to have surrendered,” I told Hector.

  “Just kill them, Charlotte.” Apparently, he was less trusting than I am.

  “But-”

  “Can you really trust a cultist?”

  I took a split second to consider how much ammunition I had and decided to do something astonishingly rash. I quickly fired at the ground and then muted the receiver on my phone.

  “Make a break for the exit. You might survive.” The cultist scrambled off faster than I could unmute my phone and lie about having killed them to Hector.

  “Good. Are you ready to throw the switch now?” He didn’t suspect me at all.

  “Give me a countdown, Hector.” He did, and on the count of three, I pulled the switch.

  “Meet us at the lower antechamber,” he told me. In the background of the call, I could hear something like a giant machine winding down. “There might be some isolated resistance left, so keep on your guard.” I did, but I didn’t encounter any more cultists; the rendezvous went off without a hitch, leaving us with access to the cult’s sacred vaults.

  After months of titanic struggle, the Arbalest finally lay before us! Apparently, the Amdahl cultists hadn’t had the sense to use it against us. Was it too sacred for them to even handle? It’d be really awkward if it accidentally fell off its embellished pedestal and it turned out that merely reseating it was blasphemy.

  “It’s all yours, Charlotte,” Hax reminded me. If I had to guess, I was currently staring blankly at the Arbalest on its pedestal and drooling slightly. It was hard to tell what my body was up to when all of my mind was focused on the prize at hand. Then I realized I could use my mind to influence what my body was doing, and mentally commanded myself to walk forwards and pick the damn thing up. Much to my surprise, it worked!

  I soon found myself clutching the Arbalest for dear life. That seemed unnecessarily paranoid, so I commanded my hands to relax their grip ever so slightly. My knuckles returned to their normal color. I had a vague sense of magic trying to enter my body and failing; my working hypothesis was that I still couldn’t use analog magic. That hardly mattered, though. I still had my spellscripting prowess and could presumably find a way to combine it with the Arbalest’s powers-

  “Carbon fiber. I think that’s what it is, anyways,” interrupted Azure. On closer inspection, it did look pretty strange. If you were to cast (heh) this crossbow into the Middle Ages, the local arbelists (double heh) were probably going to give you a hard time. I recognized the shape, but the Arbalest otherwise looked and felt like no crossbow I’d ever seen. Its jet black body caught the light, but it was too lightweight and springy to be any sort of metal – in short, carbon fiber. The sleek proportions and occasional blinking LEDs were ripped from the case of a contemporary gaming PC. At this point, I realized that I was seizing up again. I had to figure out how to interface this thing with an actual computer so that I could unleash its assuredly enormous powers, and I wasn’t going to be able to do that if I lost my own crucial mind/body link.

  I should really see a psychiatrist when this is all over. These moments of dissociation can’t be healthy.

  After a moment, I regained control of my actions yet again. I grabbed my phone from my pocket and started looking for a way to connect it to the Arbalest. I briefly considered taping it to the limbs, but I realized that would keep me from using the crossbow as a crossbow (why would I need to do something so patently ridiculous?). Plus, I didn’t have any tape on hand, and I didn’t know where in hell I could possibly get any. I decided on a more rigorous and empirical method of probing the Arbalest’s abilities. The first step in that was to see if I could establish a link between it and my phone by mere contact. It’d worked for my Walther. Surely it would do something for an actual magical device?

  A few furtive taps had little effect. I managed to summon a few dangerous-looking sparks from my phone, but that was about it. Still, that proved I could at least transfer magical energy from the Arbalest to my phone. I just needed to find a better way to do it. Maybe there was a way to connect a USB cable? I dragged my hands over every exposed surface of the Arbalest...and immediately recoiled as it spat out a few puffs of fire.

  Which part of the crossbow had I touched to cause that? I figured it out pretty soon – my own wrist-implanted USB port was rubbing up against a connector I hadn’t noticed before. That made things easy. I wondered what would happen if I connected myself to the Arbalest, but something told me that’d be a bad idea. At best, the magic of the Arbalest would destroy me, and I don’t even want to imagine what else could go wrong. Best to just stick with the phone.

  “Anyone got a USB to USB cable?” I asked. Hax and Azure dutifully started searching the chamber for spare electronics, and I went over to a different part of the room to see if I could dig anything up.

  “No luck so far,” Hax said after a few minutes. “Did these guys even use their precious toy?”

  “I doubt it. Cultists are weird like that,” Azure responded. They both snickered a bit and returned to their search. I wasn’t finding anything good, either. Lots of dust, a stray polished femur, a metal helmet that looked like it’d come out of the Bronze Age, but no consumer electronics! I decided drastic action was needed and called Hector again.

  “What is it this time?” he said. Now that the fighting had passed, he just seemed exasperated. Better mad than dead, though.

  “Can we get a USB connector delivered down here? I think we need it for the Arbalest,” I asked. I heard a sigh on the line.

  “I’ll ask around, but I can’t promise anything. We took major casualties from the battle, and our hardware is badly beaten up, too. We might only have melted cables at this point,” responded Hector. At least it wasn’t a no. Worst case is we’d have to hit up an electronics store when we got back to Earth. We’d passed by one in Las Médulas once or twice when we were working things out with Ulysses and company – it was a mom and pop operation that hadn’t yet succumbed to human branding/buyout efforts, but there was a good chance their stock would be a decade or more out of date.

  Back to searching the room. The sheer amount of junk in here that I hadn’t immediately taken in due to my obsession with the Arbalest was concerning, to say the least. I wasn’t finding anything that looked even vaguely technological! The cultists had probably gone full bogosort on their personal possessions to spite me. I was about to throw up my hands in frustration when my phone started ringing. I picked up – Hector yet again.

  “It’s your lucky day, Charlotte. One of our magicians has a spare USB to USB cable. Is that what you need? We can have it delivered to the Arbalest room in a few minutes,” he said.

  “Get it down here!” I half-shrieked. Either I wasn’t very good at concealing my
excitement, or the Arbalest was already beginning to corrupt me. Maybe the entire mountain was like that! I hoped we weren’t actually having our minds warped. Then I noticed that Azure and Haxabalatnar were still searching. What were they finding to distract from my outbursts?

  “Guys! Hector’s delivering a cable down here. You don’t have to keep searching!” I shouted. Azure whooped in joy; Haxabalatnar gave me a thumbs up and kept ransacking the Amdahl cult’s possessions. About half a minute later, he pulled out a copy of what, on closer inspection, was the box of a video game called Karateka.

  “I’m sending this to my dad when we get back to Las Médulas. He’ll get a kick out of it,” Hax explained, pointing to a label in the lower left proclaiming it was intended for an Apple II PC. I’m glad he was able to find something to make this trip worth his while. The Arbalest clearly wasn’t doing it for him in the same way it excited me.

  Hector’s courier arrived with a USB cable a few minutes later. Hax had continued to ransack the room and had found a deck of playing cards; Azure was teaching him how to play gin rummy off in a corner. As much as I’d needed them to get this far, I could handle the next steps on my own. I wired up the Arbalest to my phone, which immediately gave me a little notification saying that it’d detected a new device. That was more likely to be a good sign than sparks of raw magic. Time to play around and see what I could do.

  I took my phone in one hand and the Arbalest in the other, taking special care not to tangle up the USB cable, as well as continuing to keep my own USB jack clear of the components. What was my first spell going to be? Battery life wasn’t a critical concern, so I decided to load up the most boring and basic magic missile script I had. I pointed both the phone and Arbalest at the furthest wall and ran the script. The Arbalest immediately showed its worth by launching an enormous blast of rainbow energy at the wall, which shed a bunch of plaster chunks in a desperate attempt to defend itself. This was the power source I’d felt probing at me! Usually, a magic missile from the phone would drain a big chunk of my battery life and heat the phone substantially to boot. With the help of the Arbalest, though, my phone remained pristine and ready for further punishment.

  “Don’t go causing a cave in,” Haxabalatnar chided me. He had a valid point – the last way I wanted my adventure to end was to be crushed under a mile of rock. Otherwise, he didn’t seem particularly interested in me. I guess gin rummy is a demanding mistress.

  “I’m going to hold off on further experimentation until we get back outside,” I told him. For the moment, it was enough that I knew I could operate the Arbalest. With the cultists gone, there was plenty of time to refine my technique and write software to get around its idiosyncrasies.

  It took us a while to get back to our base camp. The wall climber had managed to foul up our back door in its infinite wisdom and dexterity, so we couldn’t climb up the drill shaft. That meant we had to take the front exit out, which gave us plenty of opportunity to climb staircases and take in the Amdahl cult’s taste for monumental architecture. The back rooms of the complex had been painfully utilitarian, but as we made our way out, our surroundings became ever more ornate.

  We reached an extravagant dining room around the halfway point. It became clear that the cult had taken in some masterful artisans and somehow managed to get their money’s worth out of them. On one of the walls, there was a huge fresco depicting a human figure in a tasteful black robe (presumably Gene Amdahl) conjuring the tape drives of an old mainframe out of a formless desert, while humans, chthons, and a gigantic spider with a single distended eye gazed on in reverence. Several golden cauldrons decorated the floor – their contents had presumably been barely edible slop when compared with the magnificence of the surroundings, but that’s why people use cast iron cookware instead of gold. My attention turned to the tables and chairs of the room. Whether or not the Chippewas could bear quality hardwood was a spirited debate between the poor climate and magical background radiation, but the Amdahl cult had neatly sidestepped the issue by building their furniture out of stone. It made for a solemn and dignified counterpoint to the ostentatious decorations. I also noticed a few laptops scattered around the place. If the cultists had actually used them for magic, they might have survived at our expense. Just our luck that a bunch of technology worshipers didn’t have any idea how to properly use their toys.

  Once we’d passed the dining room, I resolved not to waste your time describing the minutiae of the cultist’s furnishings, and instead, to skip to the giant death robot Hector’s forces had fought. It looked clunky – more like a crude cyclopean monster ripped from Homer’s Odyssey than anything else. Clearly, the locals did not hold mecha anime in high regard. Now that the robot was deactivated and immobile, it looked clunky, even obsolete. Still, I was glad I didn’t have to fight it myself.

  “Good, you’re out. We’re going to strip this place to the bone,” said a soldier milling around aimlessly at the front entrance.

  “Watch out for the actual bones. They’ve got tons of them,” responded Haxabalatnar. The soldier chuckled at that and walked into the compound.

  As far as I was concerned, the weather was celebrating our victory over the Amdahl cult. The sky had turned a terrestrial shade of blue, with scattered clouds and something resembling a sun brightening the day. When did I last go to sleep? Now wasn’t the time to think about that – we had a liaison here to Jeep us back to the drill site.

  I crashed down and fell asleep mere seconds after I’d buckled myself into the Jeep. It didn’t get me much rest, though. I woke up a few minutes later once we began ascending a series of bumpy switchback turns. Despite my discomfort, we made it back to the drill site, to be greeted by the halfhearted cheers of the mining crew. Some of them would eventually get to go home, but in the last few days, I’d heard that many were now contracted to rip the robotic components out of Mount Amdahl. Was this merely mining, or was it also archaeology? Only time would tell.

  After I’d properly rested and eaten some food, it was time to plan our next steps. Then I could get back to playing with the Arbalest. We’d acquired a new set of maps that had been delivered straight from Agnus’s court; they depicted all the lands Sigmar had ever conquered. Every second we spent taking in his conquests brought Sigmar closer to new acquisitions, and we didn’t want our maps to become obsolete. Azure shuddered when we unfurled a map showing off her occupied...corporatocracy? Now wasn’t really the time for me to ask how she’d governed her people. To be fair, dealing with paper maps made me shudder, as well. Some, but not all of the maps were digitized, and the few laptops we had around here were loaded with a nice viewing program. I wanted to spend as much time with those as I could, but until someone finished scanning and annotating everything, we were stuck with paper.

  “The good news is that we don’t have to walk into Sigmar’s demesne, if we can get a suitable portal going,” I explained to Hax and Azure. “Got any ideas where we should put it?”

  “I’d say somewhere a bit out of the way, so we can move in hardware and reinforcements without drawing too much attention to ourselves,” suggested Haxabalatnar. Azure nodded in agreement, and Hax then pointed to a few places on the map that he thought would fit the bill nicely.

  “Sigmar is apparently exploiting Hyperion’s old dam now,” he said. “Maybe we could take that offline for a bit to start chipping at his resources...and sanity, if we’re lucky.” He paused for a moment.

  “He seemed to think the dam was pretty important when I took it for him. What if the security’s on full alert?” I responded.

  “Yeah, good point. If stealth is important, then I’d say we should try either the Forest of Glass, or the Giant’s Entrails. More dangerous than his industrial zones, though.” Hax pondered the maps for a moment.

  “Definitely the Forest if we go for stealth,” said Azure. “I think you guys would catch every disease known to man if you tried to traverse the Giant�
�s Entrails.”

  “That, and the stench. Charlotte, have you got any input?”

  “The Forest is probably our best insertion point, but what do we do next? I don’t know how loyal Sigmar’s foot soldiers are, but his elites could give us trouble,” I said. In theory, I thought the best option was to lure Sigmar out into an “honorable” duel, where I would use the Arbalest to overcome him. Intellectually, though, I knew that would get me killed – if not by Sigmar, then perhaps by an opportunistic minion taking a potshot.

  “If you want Sigmar dead that badly, we need to get his troops to turn on him. If he’s as erratic as we’ve heard, that shouldn’t be too hard. Besides, Azure can telepathically dominate anyone who tries to speak against us, right?” Haxabalatnar was really throwing himself into planning our invasion. I’d previously got the impression that he was interested in the Arbalest more as a deterrent than a tool of conquest, but in his defense, what’s a better deterrent to invasion than a weapon of mass destruction??

  “Telepathically dominating people is unethical, Hax,” Azure quipped. Judging from her tone of voice, I don’t think she really cared about the ethics of our plans, but Hax didn’t pick up on that.

  “Is it worse than allowing an unstable funny animal to run rampant?” he countered.

  “Good point.”

  “One other thing,” said Azure. “I think Sigmar is more likely to notice if we try to make a portal inside hell, so I recommend we make a quick trip back to Earth in order to stock up on provisions and maybe recruit some extra mercenaries, if Agnus will spot us the cash.”