Behind the Bitmask

by Jessica Kagan

  I couldn’t afford to get complacent; not everyone was as lazy, or callous, or shortsighted as Sigmar. I certainly couldn’t afford to be. I had to keep practicing my magic, my guncraft, my martial arts...and it probably wouldn’t hurt to learn some of the administrative and logistical skills everyone around me seemed to have. Those win wars.

  Azure came back, carrying a chthon that was green and porcine, but almost certainly not mean. More than anything, he looked like he was afraid of heights. Enter Hermes, who’d come to the battlefield in a tailored (if slightly frayed and dirty) suit and who nurtured dreams of becoming a doctor, if his white briefcase with a red cross was any indicator. This was probably the best we could get until we reached somewhere more civilized.

  “You...you should have dropped me off closer to the patient,” he stuttered.

  “Up you go then!” responded Azure, who, much to Hermes’ displeasure, lifted him back off the ground. Brennos and I followed her on foot. When we got there, Hax was briefing Hermes on Noah’s unfortunate plight; to his credit, Hermes seemed less frightened now that he wasn’t about to be lifted off the ground.

  “Did I ever tell you about that time I rafted down the river Phlegethon on a rusty PDP-11?” Noah said to me. He seemed more delirious than before. If Hermes was going to do something to help him, now was the time.

  “I can stabilize Noah, but I need your titan friend to bring over Kethyres, who has some wood I can use to make a splint,” Hermes explained to Hax.

  “Azure’s only one person, so some of your buddies are going to have to walk,” Hax said. He sounded about as concerned for Noah’s well-being as I did, though the fact that he’d stayed behind and tried to do anything to protect the spellbreaker tended to throw that theory into question. Or was it I who cared more than I’d initially expected? I was here, after all... But where else could I go?

  “Where are you going to take Noah?” asked Hermes. Haxabalatnar and I both shrugged. We really hadn’t thought this through beyond Sigmar’s death. Surely, the remnants of his army hadn’t taken a one-way trip.

  “I was thinking he might want to go back to Earth. Isn’t that right, Noah?” That perked our patient up a bit.

  “I have a family to feed,” Noah interjected.

  “How are we going to get out of this desert? Unless we can do that, there’s no point in speculating on where to go next,” I said.

  “After you nuked Terrorize and Ravage, we set up a base camp about a mile from here,” Hermes explained. “I think we have enough energy left to set up one portal, but to use your words, you’re going to have to walk.”

  Bullseye.

  “I’ve walked a thousand miles just to kill Sigmar-” I began.

  “No, you haven’t,” Hax interrupted. He was probably right.

  “Maybe not, but I’ve walked enough that one more mile isn’t going to kill me. How long until Noah’s ready for transport?”

  “Won’t be long once we get that splint and a stretcher,” said Hermes.

  It wasn’t long. Once Azure ferried over Kethyres and a few more of Hermes’ buddies (apparently doctors are popular), the work required to transport Noah proceeded at a satisfying clip. Hermes then gestured to his laborers; they gently lifted Noah’s stretcher off the ground, and we marched off. My adrenaline had subsided enough that I was beginning to notice a set of lingering aches and pains left over from my climactic showdown with Sigmar. Nothing in my body seemed to be broken or otherwise nonfunctional, so I figured it wasn’t anything a good night’s sleep would fix. Still, I made a mental note to get a physical when I got the chance... Then I remembered that my previous doctor was still in Minneapolis. Guess I needed to find a new one.

  I’m certain that my body and mind eventually dropped into a healing trance, as the next few days are a blur. The base camp we arrived at wasn’t luxurious, but it made the bone desert about as comfortable as it could be. I spent most of my time drinking, partying, and commiserating with the remains of Sigmar’s army. I didn’t meet anyone I recognized from the coven, though. I’m guessing he’d kept his organizations well separated for whatever reason. Something else was missing, too, now that I thought about it.

  “What happened to those gigantic birds Sigmar used to have?” I asked Hermes during his downtime. With all the injured soldiers around, he didn’t get to drink and party...much.

  “They defected at some point. Some nasty spat about roosting privileges or whatever,” he responded. I asked a few more locals the same question and got about the same answer. Guess I’d not been the first to reject Sigmar’s plans.

  Azure’s presence during those bacchanalian days provided me a few moments of incandescent clarity (and ecstasy; she nearly blew my ears out as I got better at manipulating her soft and inviting, yet firm and supportive flesh). Even as I fell back into my hedonistic ways, she was gradually pushing me to consider the question of what to do with all of Sigmar’s ill-gained land.

  “Let’s get a real, formal conference going,” I told her from the small tent we were sharing. “We can restore the borders of anyone who’s still got a functioning government and then negotiate to split up the rest.”

  “That’s the funny thing,” Azure responded, her fingers brushing (!) over my stomach. “Sigmar did a good job of killing off anyone who had an actual claim to land he wanted.”

  “He didn’t kill you, fortunately.”

  “I didn’t really have a claim. More of a lease, really. There aren’t a lot of zoning laws in hell.” Azure’s hand drifted a bit lower.

  “Are you thinking about moving your people back there?” And, a bit lower still.

  “Maybe. For all I know, we might just look for a new office closer to civilization.”

  With the preparations for a last portal going, Azure and I deepened our physical connection, but also spent time lobbying the army remnant to take refuge at Agnus’s court. This was initially more for our convenience than anything else, but someone managed to reestablish contact with Agnus after the second day. Haxabalatnar had spent some of his time convincing Agnus that he should employ at least the best and brightest among the now disorganized soldiers.

  “As far as I know, the stupidest of them got culled off when we fought them, so the survivors should be disproportionately capable,” I overheard him saying during a phone call. This may have been a joke, but Haxabalatnar seemed to have a better and less obviously subordinate role in Agnus’s government, so it was probably better for such words to come out of his mouth than my own.

  Eventually, with the help of skilled technicians here and in Agnus’s court, we finished preparing our portal. It opened without much fanfare, giving us a glimpse of a lavishly-decorated receiving station. I was getting sick of Sigmar’s boneyard, especially after the cartoon fanfares that burst out in the sky every so often began interfering with my sleep cycle. Therefore, Azure and I were almost the first to go through.

  Once I crossed the threshold, I realized that I’d never tried to use this transport hub. Perhaps my destinations were too remote? I looked at the scrolling marquees above the other portals and immediately regretted it – their color schemes represented a folly unseen since the days of the Windows 3.1 “Hot Dog Stand” theme. I insisted on knowing, though. Eventually, my eyes adjusted, revealing place names entirely unknown to me, with the exception of one proclaiming a permanent connection to Cupertino. It made sense – Cupertino was allegedly the place on Earth with the highest levels of background magic. Was this obvious link between worlds a sign of mutual cooperation, or impending conquest?

  Even if I’d defeated Sigmar, his words about human interference in hell had taken over my mind. I’d have to come to terms with it at some point.

  “What’s it going to be, Charlotte? Do I get to keep my independence?”

  We’d scrambled to Agnus’s court once we passed through the portal. He’d repaid the favor by letti
ng us bring him up to speed without even forcing us to wait for him to insert another cursed object into his body. This was not enough to ease the Arbalest’s fears.

  I HAVE COME TO REGRET EVERY ONE OF MY LIFE’S DECISIONS, AND OTHER CLICHED SENTIMENTS.

  Despite everything, Agnus had taken to the Arbalest almost as quickly as he might’ve had he been the one to wield it. Azure didn’t seem to think he had any interest in acquiring it, but Haxabalatnar had his doubts.

  “He wouldn’t have sent me to help you if he didn’t want a say in its fate,” he’d explained before we went in to talk to him. I imagined that Agnus would have a hard time trying to seize the Arbalest from Azure, but for all we know, he would somehow be able to convince Azure to part with it. After all, Agnus had built his city’s defenses out of entertainment and pop culture. His people skills had to be pretty impressive.

  Agnus seemed more surprised than relieved that we’d managed to comprehensively shatter Sigmar’s various sources of power. Apparently, he thought we were going to head back to his territory when we’d retrieved the Arbalest and help him turn his city into a fortress. Perhaps that would’ve worked, but between my burning desire for revenge and Azure tapping into the Arbalest, we’d settled on doing things the aggressive, flashy way. Now, the court and city were the only constants in a new and immense power vacuum. Agnus quickly pulled up a map of the surrounding lands on a wall-mounted plasma TV to demonstrate just how much terra nullius we’d created. This excited him more than was healthy.

  “Okay, this is a pretty good chunk of land. It’s at least the size of Austria. That’s pretty good, right?” he began, frantically gesturing at various points on the map as he spoke.

  “How many people did Sigmar end up killing? The latest population estimate is a measly hundred thousand people,” I responded.

  “That’s actually a record. The growth rate skyrocketed about 50 years ago. I blame the Green Revolution.”

  “It’s hard for anything other than titans to survive in most of these places,” Haxabalatnar added.

  “That’s the thing – if what happened to Floating Point is any indicator, us titans can really fuck up a plot of land pretty badly if we’re not careful. You know how much we have to pay for construction around here? It’s a lot less than you’d think.” Personally, I figured that if the new wave of titans was anything like him (instead of Aux or Floating Point), there’d be more of a market for human-compatible buildings and terraforming. In short, I was getting distracted.

  “We’ve still got a small country’s worth of territory to divvy up,” I said, hoping to get things back on track. “Azure, how much land did you directly administer before Sigmar seized it?”

  “Very little. That’d be the red spot on the map,” she responded, pointing to it. It really needed an inset.

  “Think you can annex the rest of it?”

  “Heavens, no! I can expand a bit, but the last thing I want to do is build a nation state.”

  “That doesn’t make things easier for us. If we don’t divvy this land up somehow, it might get occupied by someone who isn’t willing to respect my neutrality,” said Agnus.

  “I’m not far off from you. How about we claim enough to make a corridor, and then we can build some roads and developments. Maybe start up some joint farms or something? Farming’s good money.”

  “So I heard!”

  I realized that Agnus and Azure weren’t really interested in creating a strong hell-native government on their lands or doing any of the hard work required to divvy up the majority of the land. They lapsed into an extended discussion of the local weather patterns and what sort of crops would be best suited to their chunk of hell.

  “Charlotte, you have leadership experience. Why don’t you take over and make the nation you’ve always dreamed of?” Agnus suddenly asked me.

  “What? No! That’s way too much pressure!” I responded. Even if I wasn’t a fugitive entertaining increasingly elaborate fantasies of an overwhelming American invasion, I wasn’t ready to try and create my own queendom. It sounded like the sort of thing that would interfere with my (admittedly half-formed) plans to further study computer science and the foundations of magic.

  Yet again, something drifted up from the pieces of history and social sciences I’d picked up in the past. Agnus and Azure were going about this the wrong way! Titans seemed to take an autocratic (if not tyrannical) approach to governing their lands – everything has to be under their control. Based on our experiences in Las Médulas, Sigmar broke the mold simply by neglecting large swathes of his enormous domain. This obviously wasn’t a great solution, but you could go a long way by appointing representatives to govern chunks of a polity. We just needed to find people we could delegate responsibilities to. I now had the seed of a bold idea.

  “Agnus, what do we know about the economies of the lands Sigmar conquered?” I asked. This gave him a moment’s pause.

  “Slim to non-existent! There’s Las Médulas, and a few other scattered mining and manufacturing towns, and there’s a big rice farming operation somewhere downstream of Hyperion’s semiconductor fabrication plant, but it’s mostly subsistence agriculture or hunter gatherer crap.” Honestly, he didn’t sound too enthused with this. Maybe he didn’t think he could draw much of a profit from what was left. After all, he had a city to run. But it occurred to me that even if Agnus didn’t particularly care what went on outside his municipal borders, there were still a hundred thousand people out in his new hinterland who cared very deeply about their own affairs.

  “Here’s what you do,” I told them. “You take these industries, you find whoever’s in charge, you draw some provinces, and appoint the local leaders as your governors. Give them protection and good deals on cutting-edge Earth technology in return for a percentage of their income. The more they make, the more money you get, and the more you can pump back into them. It’s Capitalism 101, and pretty soon you’ll have a bunch of economic migrants who are willing to do anything to become your loyal citizens.”

  I had a feeling my high school social studies teacher would’ve slapped me for this, but beyond being about what I remembered from her classes, it was also strikingly similar to how I’d handled the Aux cult. It was at least sufficient to begin by forging contacts with your immediate subordinates. Forging direct connections with the rank and file was worth a look as well, but it would break down at empire building scales. Fortunately, Agnus seemed to understand what I was getting at. I saw a positively devilish grin form on his face. Was that a titan thing? Azure could look like that when she wanted, and I think Sigmar’s platypus face could’ve at least approximate the sentiment.

  I looked over at Haxabalatnar – he’d been very quiet, though he looked as if he was at least interested in my administrative proposal.

  “Why didn’t I think of that before? Let someone handle the hard bits, and keep most of their spoils. Then, I can skim off the top-”

  “No, that would be corrupt,” I interrupted, hoping to keep Agnus from getting too excited. That would end explosively.

  “Yes, it would be! I am the Lord of Vice, after all. I have a reputation to keep!” I had better things to do than question that.

  “So in summary, I’ll take your suggestion, Charlotte. Minus Azure’s requested share, of course,” said Agnus, who seemed to calm down.

  “Just be glad I’m not requesting more from you,” she said, striking an especially sassy pose. “Real power comes from information, anyways.”

  NO, REAL POWER COMES FROM RESPONSIBLE CONTROL OF SCARCE ENERGY RESOURCES.

  “I also have a crossbow, I guess.”

  It was more of a single step than a journey of a thousand miles, but we were on the way to some sort of resolution.

  “I’m going to go out and get some coffee. Anyone want anything?” Haxabalatnar suddenly said.

  “I’m good. Coffee just doesn’t taste
right if you let it cool,” Azure responded.

  “Can you get me one of the Starbucks coffee machines? Use my credit card. They’ll understand,” Agnus added. Haxabalatnar shrugged at this and looked to me for an order. I realized that I hadn’t had coffee in months. I needed to get out of the throne room.

  “You know what? I’ll accompany you, if that’s okay.”

  “Sure, come on.”

  I departed alongside Haxabalatnar, and we walked into the sunlight. It was the first of May. We walked past a church that insisted it was Easter Sunday. The streets were crowded with chthons and humans of all shapes and walks of life...well, the sidewalks; enough cars and buses had made their way into the roads that crossing anywhere other than a controlled stop was liable to get somebody killed. Still, they were lively streets.

  “Makes you wish you were back home in Minneapolis, doesn’t it?” Haxabalatnar asked as we gradually converged on the mall complex that contained the local Starbucks. I took a moment to mull that over – this was where Azure and I had first truly bonded, and where I’d reconnected with Edgar, setting off my whole treasure hunt in the first place. Perhaps another visit would change the trajectory of my life yet again? Maybe it didn’t actually need to. Maybe a latte could just be a latte for once.

  “Actually, I’d say that this is my home now,” I responded. It felt right to return to somewhere, anywhere that was familiar.

  “What, you live in the coffee shop now?”

  “Damn it, I meant the city, not the Starbucks!”

  We crossed the threshold. I couldn’t help but briefly entertain a fantasy of living in a coffeehouse, but I decided the noise and ambient stimulants would rapidly render me worthless for anything other than slam poetry. Haxabalatnar went over to the counter to work on Agnus’s latest request. The barista groaned, and then presumably went to bring the bad news to his colleagues. It wasn’t that important to me. I’d won my latest battle, and I could afford to relax and savor life for a while before I had to plan my next move.