George Martin - The Way of the Wizard

The Magister doesn’t seem to notice me. He fiddles with a mojo-charged gadget that I swear is some kind of hacked Zune . It figures that one evil empire would be using the products of another. That’s what cube jockeys call synergy .

He looks up as if surprised to find himself in the dank concrete cell with a surprisingly untortured prisoner, then smiles and nods. He waves to the agents, and they port out leaving only the smell of grandpa farts.

I wiggle a bit to confirm that my chair is bolted to the floor. When I do, I notice that the pendant that launched the Box sprog is still on the table. The stone table rises in a seamless piece from the cell floor between the chairs. I palm the pendant as quick as I can, hoping that the Magister doesn’t notice. Thank Cthulhu, he doesn’t seem to.

Magister Atretius slumps into the chair across from me, sighing. I readjust my age estimate downward. This kid looks like he’s barely out of high school. “I really hate to bring you in, Hidr. I’m a big fan. I’ve been reverse engineering your sprogs since I was in junior high.”

I try to muster up some spit, but my mouth is dry from all the shouting in the Box. “So you’re a turncoat.”

He shrugs. “Piracy doesn’t pay. Literally, in money or power, and I don’t mean ‘mojo.’ Pirates are like children playing with firecrackers. The MAA has nuclear warheads. I’m just the kind of guy who wants access to the biggest bombs.” He taps his finger on the screen of his gadget, reading something. “I’m sure you know why you’re here,” Atretius says after a moment.

“Yeah I know why, but your goons didn’t bother to read me my rights. I think I can get this case thrown out. Plus, it was entrapment or something.”

“Or something.” He sighs again. “We can charge you with as many counts of spell copyright infringement as we want, aiding spell copyright violation, facilitating the avoidance of MAA authorities, and a dozen other charges you’ve never even heard of.”

Only one of those words really mattered to me. “ ‘ Can ?’ Not ‘ will ’?”

“I’ve been kissing my superior’s asses all day to get you this deal, so I want you to listen to me before you get sarcastic and all ‘down with the man!’ ”

“Big Mother can suck Donkey Kong’s dong.” My heart’s not really in the insult, but I feel it’s expected. (Don’t you even ask me who Donkey Kong is, or I will not be responsible for my actions.)

The Magister shakes his head, tsking. “ ‘The Magical Association of Atlantis is an organization made up of numerous individuals and as such cannot comply with your demand.’ Would you believe that’s verbatim from a memorandum on ‘prisoner relations’ I got yesterday? Look, I’m not asking you to turn in anyone. We haven’t even managed to take down your distribution network. Even with all your gear, we still can’t crack your obfuscation. Routing the connections through routers in Chaos Space and the Outer Realms is brilliant, by the way. Oh, and it’s your skill with server obfuscation that is one of the reasons you are perfect for this job.”

I laugh just a little hysterically. “You’re offering me a job ?” Before I can explain how I wouldn’t work for MAA if my balls were on fire and they had the last glass of water in the world, he interrupts.

“Piracy is not the only concern of the organization. Before both our times, the MAA was primarily tasked with knowledge control — keeping dangerous stuff out of the hands of people too stupid to know how to use it. The relaxed attitude your upstart cabals have about recruiting means stopping piracy and controlling access to the lore is the same thing now.”

I nod. I think I remember having read that somewhere before, maybe in Captain Bl00d’s manifesto. Ancient history.

“We have a problem that our most technically-inclined mages are unable to solve. Have you heard of 1CB?”

It sounds Web 2.0 trendy, but doesn’t ring a bell. I shake my head.

“One-Click Banishment. An unknown party has put up a website that allows users to enter the True Name of anyone and with the click of a button, send the target immediately to the Gray Fields.”

I stare at him. “How is that even possible?”

“I don’t know, but I assure you it is. We have been overwhelmed with transport work. Do you know how much mana it costs to bring them back and wipe their memories? We need a better tactic. We need to shut it down.”

“It shouldn’t be hard to take down a website,” I say. “A denial of service attack can do it, and I know you guys know about those. You’ve tried them on TomeTracker. And failed, of course.” I allow myself a smirk.

“Guy before me. Real idiot. Our zombie nets do come in handy, but not for dealing with the likes of you. I could see right from the start that your obfuscation techniques would protect from DoS attacks. They don’t work on your sites and they do not work on 1CB for the same reason. But because my superiors are idiots, over half the world’s bandwidth is being taken up by a MAA DoS attack on 1CB. The server’s load times have not been effected one millisecond.”

“Huh,” I say. Even I can be at a loss for words sometimes. “A sprog capable of transporting mundanes to another plane costs terabytes of mojo, or mana, or whatever you call it. That should make it easier to track down. Who has that kind of juice?”

“We can only account for registered, legal stores of mojo, and while they are taxed by our relocation project, every focule of energy is accounted for.”

I mentally run through a list of what underground groups might come close to having enough stored mojo to power the 1CB sprog. The Spam Kings, maybe. They powered the unduplicatus spell that our fellow Buccaneers used to escape the MAA a couple of years back, and that thing was a mojo hog. Of course, the Pornomancers have mojo to spare, but ’porting eyeballs away from screens would run contrary to their whole gig. I check off our Order right away. Since Captain Bl00d was routed to dev/dead, we’ve been too disorganized to pull off anything like this, and besides, I would have heard about it. (You kids can’t keep a secret. Soon as you learn something juicy, you’re on the forums spouting off.)

The Socialistas can keep a secret, but they probably haven’t accumulated that kind of mojo. They burn it as fast as they get it on lovey-dovey good-will crap. The HardC0re have buckets of juice, but are worse than us about agreeing on anything. They dissolve into a Playstation vs. Xbox flame war any time they try to make a group decision.

“Any idea what kind of traffic the site has seen?” I ask. “It hasn’t appeared on the social news sites, has it?”

The Magister shakes his head. “Our moles are limiting the public knowledge of 1CB. We’re blocking emails, tweets, and SMS that include the url by retasking Project Echelon. Yeah, we can do that. But we can’t control the spread through person-to-person communications, not with our mojo taxed rescuing the targets from eternal boredom. Our last count put the number of banished at over fifty thousand.”

“How the hell do fifty thousand mundanes disappear without it being noticed by the media?” I can’t help myself — I’m getting into the mystery.

He stares at me, waiting for me to remember who I am dealing with.“Like I said, the cover-up is a considerable drain on our resources. I don’t have an agent I can put on this. I’m the ideal candidate, but I’m busy keeping my superiors from doing anything… drastic. Which brings us to you. You’re more skilled than most of my agents anyway.”

“Uh, thanks. So we can be sure that this is a major power play by an unknown. Also, nobody offers this kind of power for free. There’s a catch somewhere,” I scratch my chin, thinking. “I can see why you guys are worried, I guess.”