George Martin - The Way of the Wizard

Here in the U.S., the user agreement constitutes a legal contract — the parties being the site user and this entity Baalphorum, who I have never heard of but I am pretty certain is one of the lesser Elder Gods. Those entities have always codified their arrangements with humans in contracts. Guess modern contract law has provided them a few new loopholes and tricks since the days of Mephistopheles.

I click “cancel” and close my browser. I consider setting fire to my computer, just to be sure. Giving away your soul in exchange for a single banishment is what we in the m4gick game call a sucker’s deal.

(That’s lesson number three. If you are going to trade your soul for anything, it’s got to at least involve a computer with more processor cores than a hydra has heads. Not what amounts to an annoying, even if amusing and powerful, prank.)

I Skype a contact of mine in the Socialistas, an old-school pagan New Ager who likes reading the dusty books even if they don’t have spells in them. Me, I could never be bothered. Her name is Cristina. No handle. That’s how boring the Socialistas are.

The call beeps for five minutes (I’m patient) before Cristina answers in a mush of words I can’t make out.

“What?”

“I said, ‘Do you have any fucking idea what time it is?’ ”

I look out my window. “Uh… dark?” I don’t even know what day it is. I glance at my system clock and see that it’s been a week since I was captured, and, oh, it is currently 4 AM.

“What do you need now, Hidr?” I hear another feminine voice in the background asking a question. Christina covers the mic and I can’t make out his reply. I hear a giggle as she comes back on. “Make it quick, I have company.”

“You always have company, you lucky girl. This won’t take long and I’ll send you a gig of mojo for your trouble. I need to know if you’ve heard of an Elder God named Baalphorum.”

Christina hmms . “Maybe. Hold on.” The call goes quiet, then I can hear the fwit-fwit of pages flipping. “ ‘Classified as a lesser Arch-Demon. He is the Prince of Journeys Gone Afoul. A patron demon to highwaymen and cutthroats.’ The MAA banished him in the late ’40s, locked him up in a deep Outer Realm. You know, I think I’ve read somewhere that cultists over the years have made several attempts to free him. Apparently, he was an easy date back in the day. What’s going on?”

I sigh. “It looks like someone has found a new way to bust him out.” I explain 1CB and ask if it could free the demon somehow.

“Promised souls are souls ‘in the hand’ for some spells. He would need to quickly reap the souls or face a mystic backlash that would slingshot his thorny ass past Andromeda, but it would work.”

I file that tidbit away for later use. “How many souls would it take for a demon of Baalphorum’s stature to break out?”

“I have no idea. Math’s your game, pal.”

“Give me a guess. Less than fifty thousand?”

I can almost hear her shrug. “Probably more than that. Say, one-hundred thousand? Isn’t this what the MAA is supposed to take care of when they’re not harassing us?”

I stammer, but there’s no sense in lying to a Socialista. They always know, especially Cristina. “They’ve got me freelancing on this problem. Their resources are tied up in getting the mundanes back.”

A long pause. “Well, we’re all doomed then.”

“Gotta go, Christina. Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

I disconnect and call Atretius, who helpfully loaded his contact info into my phone before returning it. I start talking as soon as the call connects.

“This whole thing is a sucker deal in disguise. It’s in the EULA.”

There’s a long enough pause that I think maybe I’ve dropped the call, but then: “Shit. I can’t believe nobody read this thing. Do you know who or what this ‘Baalphorum’ is?”

I give him the details. He swears again.

“So we know where the mojo’s coming from to power the banishments,” Atretius says. “Baalphorum probably has mana stores in his prison. He shouldn’t be able to get anything out from the prison, but the MAA containment budgets have been slimmer since we’ve redirected our resources, so maybe there are some cracks showing. At least we know what Baalphorum is getting in exchange.”

“Someone has to be helping him on this side, but fuck if I know who,” I say. Something is bothering me that I can’t quite place. “I verified that they’re hiding the server with the same trick of Chaos space that I used on mine. The only way to trace it would be to have the actual astral encryption keys that were used to create the routing table, but I don’t have the ones used to hide 1CB, so the site itself is a dead end.”

“You better think of something quickly because… ” I hear the clackity-clack of a classic IBM keyboard. “The fecal matter just hit the fan. The link is out in the wild. The site just made Digg. It’ll be posted again to Metafilter and Reddit in minutes.”

“ What !” I nearly shout. “How did they get through?”

“Someone set up a redirect engine. It’s being submitted with different URLs every time. Someone’s been busy registering domain names. I’m transferring our DoS bots to take down all the social networking sites, but it’s going to take a bit.

“You’ve got to get out there and find who’s responsible for the site and shut them down,” Artetius says. “It’s our best chance of stopping this.”

“Yeah, sure. There’s just the one thing. I’ve got zero leads ! Well, other than that whoever put the site up knows my methods of obfuscating a server. I explained how to maybe six people in the world, but I don’t know who they really are or where they live. We’re all anonymous in Bl00d’s Cabal.”

My phone dinged to announce new email.

“I’ve just sent you dossiers on your cabal mates.”

“Holy shit! You have this information?”

Atretius yells something unintelligible in the background. “Can’t talk any longer, I need to manage things on this end. Start kicking in doors.” Click.

I scan the files, take a look at the first name and address. Before I go, I try to equip myself better, just in case. I ransack my place for gear and I turn up my old smartphone. It has a processor slower than a turd and a whole 128 megabytes of space. But it’s better than nothing. I pocket it and then broom-port to my first “interviewee.”

I arrive in a cramped basement apartment, coughing, eyes watering, gray all over with dust. A teenager, not a second older than fourteen, lies slumped over a keyboard snoring. The file says this is DedJonny, but I can’t believe it. It makes me feel so much older.

I scroll through my selection of curses and prepare to squeeze him for info.

DedJonny nearly pisses himself when I clap my hands and wake him. He babbles. “Oh shit, oh man, I didn’t do it, please, don’t—”

“Shut up,” I say calmly. “I’m Hidr. I have some questions.”

He looks relieved. “How’d you get through my defensive sprogs? Oh right — you wrote them, must have put in backdoors huh? That’s so chill.”

“I’m offended you would think that. I have ethical standards,” I snap, putting on my best “angry adult” voice. “What do you know about One Click Banishment?”

“One-what?” He blinks unconvincingly. Even an under socialized geek can see he’s lying.

I swipe the screen on my phone and select the cactus-dick curse (see the first post in this thread). I pour 100k of mojo into the spell and hit him with it.

It won’t last long, and the effect isn’t as pronounced as it would be with a few megabytes, but it does the job. He screams and paws his crotch, and that doesn’t make things any better.