George Martin - The Way of the Wizard

He runs a finger across the screen of his device and the Manacles sprog vanishes. I rub my wrists.

“We have of course been interested in apprehending you for some time. It seems like a coincidence that we caught you in Operation LittleHeadThinker when we did, but perhaps the Fates have conspired to bring you to us. I noticed similarities in the hosting methods of 1CB and your illicit site early on in our investigation. And when I saw your name on the containment roster, I pulled strings, and here we are.” Despite his apparent enthusiasm, for a moment he does not look happy. I wonder why he isn’t accusing me of building the damned thing, but I’m not going to bring it up if he isn’t. Something must have proved my innocence.

I evaluate my options. I don’t have many. I’m caught up in the situation whether I want to be or not. Whoever is running 1CB is using my bag of tricks. The routers are, you guys have to admit, one of my moments of brilliance. Routing data traffic through the Chaos plane and then the Outer Realms makes it impossible for anyone to find the servers. Do a traceroute and you end up at some tiny ISP in Argentina. You’ll get anything but the route to the actual servers. It as much a matter of pride now as anything else.

Plus, I don’t want to be banished or executed just yet. “Fine,” I say. “I’m in.”

Okay, so, my stomach is going to strangle me with my intestines if I don’t get something to eat right now, so hold tight. The story is just starting to get crazy.

Posted by Hidr at 11:14 PM Yesterday

Say what you will about the Magical Association of Atlantis and the graybeards. The Noodly One knows I have. But they have some awesome toys.

After letting me out of the cell, Atretius gives me supervised access to part of their store of High Artifacts.

That’s right, nerds: I totally got to play with Artifacts.

You might not be familiar with the term if you haven’t been in the cabal long. Artifacts are ancient implements from before the time of mechanical or digital processors, like hundreds of years old at least. They look like mundane junk, but their platonic representations in the World Object Model have been overwritten by Elder Gods, aka They Whose Awesome Powers Will Make You Shit Yourself. We’re talking beings with intellect so vast and calculating that they can work through sprog equations as easily as you add 2+2. Their mojo comes from the millions of human souls (the old school mojo source of choice) that they acquired through the centuries by trading with mages for processing time on their intellects. If you think a bored kid playing a Flash game is a good source of mojo, imagine what you get from that bored teen playing a flash game for one-hundred thousand years.

Luckily for us, the giant evil bastards were banished, bound, or annihilated when the computer revolution hit and they were no longer a “necessary evil” of m4gick. Hard to believe, but at one point the MAA were the good guys. You have to give them some credit for insuring that we aren’t all sex toys of Cthulhu as trade for a few m4gickal tricks.

The first totally awesome m4gickal trick and artifact the Magister hooks me up with is a silver medallion to protect against banishment. Passive, grounding me to the material plane like a cosmic paperweight. It scans oddly dull for energy, but Atretius assures me that’s part of how it works.

“Our mystery party may try to banish you if they find out you’re onto them,” he says. “This will stop them. All our agents are wearing them right now.”

The second thing he gives me is a broom. No sleek sports car for this MAA agent apparently. Thank the Noodly One, it doesn’t work by flying. For a moment I was honestly shitting myself at the idea of flying through the air at Mach 2 sitting on something barely wider than my thumb. Instead, it teleports me from one place to another via the Dusty meta-plane. I arrive at my destination looking like a vacuum cleaner bag had exploded in my face, but I get there in one piece.

Lastly, they returned my miscellaneous personal belongings, in particular my iPhone, newly loaded with documents pertaining to the case.

“So, what’s your plan?” Atretius asks as he escorts me through processing. It turns out I’m in some kind of massive subterranean detainment center. I’m so excited to be getting out, I don’t even hesitate to tell him.

“Inspect the site, look for clues to who is behind it. After that, we’ll see.”

“Headed back to your lair then? Good. Well, keep me informed,” he says sternly. I flip him the bird and with that, I’m outta there and back to my Bat Cave.

Now my cat needs to go out. BRB

Posted by Hidr at 12:41 AM Today

Back at my lair, I spend the first fifteen minutes checking on my servers. At this point, they’re still up (but of course. I run Linux only in my sanctum ), but something really odd is showing up in the admin logs. I notice weird packets transferring through my routers that aren’t originating from me or my servers. They shouldn’t be there. If I could spare the time to pick them apart, I would, but they don’t seem to be causing any downtime. Their volume doesn’t match what I would expect from 1CB, and they’re not on the right port for a web server anyway. I file it away for later inspection and turn to the MAA files.

They don’t tell a different story from what the Magister had explained, and I get bored reading them less than halfway through.

My first real action as an agent of the MAA is to poke at the 1CB server.

Traceroute sure enough pointed at an internet café in Hong Kong. Ha, not likely. I used a sprog to look through the monitors at the café’s clientele, but it’s just a bunch of kids playing video games.

I take a look at the site in a custom version of Mozilla I wrote for investigating things like this. The site is one page, with a very simple, clean design style. It’s not running any presentation-layer sprog code, so it’s not trying to bespell the user.

It consists of a form field for the name and a button labeled “Banish” and that’s it. The submit action on the form looks like a 256-bit encrypted Aleph symbol-set. Not a workable lead there. It would take literally all eternity to decrypt it and identify the processing sprog.

Time to test the site then. Who to use as my victim? I take an old high school yearbook from my bookshelf and flip pages until I see Danny de Marco. All my tortured nerd pain comes rushing back. Oh yes. He will do nicely.

I enter his name, checking it for typos (very carefully!) and click “Banish.” A modal window pops up with a user agreement. Ha! So not “one-click.” I move my mouse to click “accept” without thinking like I always do but then… I have a hunch and I have to pry my mouse finger back with my left hand. It goes against every computer-using instinct I have to not click through.

Must. Not. Succumb. To. Legalese.

I scroll through twelve pages of the usual “you can’t sue us” garbage before I find what I’m looking for. BY ACCEPTING THIS AGREEMENT, USER WILL BEQUEATH USER’S METAPHYSICAL-ESSENCE ENERGY, HEREAFTER REFERRED TO AS “SOUL” TO THE ENTITY KNOWN AS BAALPHORUM. THIS IS A NONREFUNDABLE TRANSACTION. ALL HAIL HIS DEMONIC VISAGE. HE WILL RETURN TO TAKE WHAT IS RIGHTFULLY HIS AND ALL SHALL TREMBLE BEFORE HIS GLORY.

And then the doc runs back to legal-speak standard bullshit. One paragraph of pure contractual evil buried in legal cruft. Clever. Nobody ever reads the user agreement text before checking the box and continuing. I’ve heard people joke that we were giving away our souls in the damned things, but I’d never seen anyone actually try it.