NOW: AUG 2nd, 2016 - DELTA LAB (RUNEWORKS)

“We wanted you to take a look at Database Array D, Madame President,” said Pendit, “as we think maybe it came to life or something.”

Wendy walked the Delta lab - the lab doing research on spellcasting - with Ricard Pendit leading the way. Ricard was an MIT grad who had applied to the NSA and had set off the search she had running (“techs with both computer science and some other compatible skill like theory of languages or higher math”). A quick interview, signing the employee agreement, then signing the geas, and then he was down here. He joined back when it was just a half dozen nerds; now he ran a lab of nerds, spies, language polyglots, purported psychics, A.I. engineers and one supposed networking super-nerd who did the Furry thing on the weekends.

Pendit led her up to the I.T. room, cold from the aircon, racks of servers standing, blinkenlights everywhere. As they walked past each rack, she could see handwritten labels on the racks - Adam, Barbie, Copacabana, until they stopped at Dingus.

Wendy said, “I understand the basics. The hardware runs VM’s - virtual machines - that are all running neural net A.I.’s and connected to a central database. Per the plan, they’re all researching the collected human diaspora and knowledge base looking for anything that could be a spell or magical effect.”

Pendit nodded. “Right. Adam mostly looks for symbology in languages, art, music, writing, relics, etc., that could be part of the 'mystic alphabet'. Barbie looks for connections between 3d permutations of runes, looking for runic language that is cross-compatible. Copa mostly does language evolution and devolution to try and find proto-languages and writing. And… uh..”

“Dingus.”

Pendit shrugged sheepishly. “...Dingus runs possible spell combinations in virtual sims to see which ones have linkages that work in sim. Once the spells work in the sim - like testing wiring components together - then we can have people test them. The problem is, the spells seem on some level to be actually working. In the sim.”

Wendy frowned, and gave Pendit a look. “Well… right?” she said. “That’s what we want.”

“No,” he said. “We just want to test it. We want it to model the spell runes all coming together and then test that everything connects and lines up. The problem is, some of the spells are actually working. For example,” he said, typing on a keyboard and monitor, bringing up some scrolling data, “we had Dingus test an Authority rune variant. Once the spell test worked, great, we checked it off. But one of the programs it shouldn’t have access to suddenly had altered security, so that Dingus could control it. One of the curses caused a memory fault that ‘killed’ another program. Things like that.”

Pendit waved his arm at the racks. “Spells seem to attack the underlying fundamental constructs of reality. So it appears the spells running in other substrates - spells running inside a computer - also affect the substrate they run in. And there’s probably leakage in both directions - so it’s possible that spells running in sim can affect things outside sim, if you know how. At least,” he shrugged, “that’s what the math says.”

“I get that, “Wendy said, looking closely at Dingus. “But what’s this business about being alive? You mean it gained sentience?”

“No, thank god. I don’t think so. It’s just that if the spells running in the VM are leaking causally to our level of reality, then that means that some Kha is being manipulated by the server. Tiny, infinitesimal amounts-”

“That’s not a big-”

“Hundreds of millions of times a day,” Pendit finished. “That much reality-altering Kha pouring through something also running symbology, also with a neural net running? I mean, any object with that much time and Kha running through it seems to practically come to life. Like the Tsukumogami, right? And there’s been other odd events around it. Ghostly voices. Unusual lights. I doubt it has a life above, say, a plant like awareness, but… you know. Can you, um?” he said, gesturing to Wendy, putting his hands up in the seeing-eye configuration.

Wendy sighed, and gazed at the server, for a good long time.

“Well, crap,” she said.

-

All over the world, the news reports of people gaining powers, or who’s natural psychic abilities becoming amplified, continued to appear. Places long-rumored to be haunted seemed to become more active.

Wendy had a theory which she floated past some of the scientists in the Theta Lab that worked on QEM research - that the probes that detonated might have vaporized their QEM components and spread them around, thus triggering magic awakenings. The scientists felt that QEM was unstable enough that while some of it might have spread that way, it would have been impossibly small. More likely, they said, that whatever energy - probably some form of Kha - it emits that seems to affect human brains through proximity was suddenly ‘flashed’ in the fusion detonation, so that the Earth got a single pulse of it. That meant that people who didn’t awaken probably wouldn’t, not without coming into contact with some QEM, anyway.

Wendy also noticed that the vast majority of awakened people were pretty low on the power scale. Nobody was being reported having abilities like hers, or like the Russians she encountered. It would seem that the combination of awakening with a decent amount of Kha and a lot of training to have the right brain structures was a requirement to really be able to do something.

Also, most people’s magic was steadfastly in the stone ages. The few spells that they found in the wild - fully working ones, if you were awakened - all relied on lots of words and gestures. Yet the words only focused on words and not pitch, which would layer the complexity of a casting and thereby shorten the time to cast; same goes for drawing runes in three dimensions and not just two. Plus the fact that Aatlan, a form of engineered-Enochian that it looked like an ancient Atlantean-like culture developed, would let you bind spells up in a macro to release all at once.

At the moment, the U.S. was winning the magical arms race, but not by much.

-

Wendy had had a few good weeks, but the last few days had been awful. Andrew kept getting sicker, spending all his time puttering around the First Residence or traveling back and forth to the hospital. Wendy had severed the Authority link they had in the hope that his Kha wouldn’t keep being sent to her. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to take - he was so conditioned at this point to love and worship her, his brain instinctually re-made the connection. She pumped him full of no-harms every chance she could, but it wasn’t working.

The dreams continued to plague her as well, which was bad, because she only slept a few hours a night as it was, and most of the time she was terrified to sleep. She could have taken something, but she had gotten paranoid that if she was knocked out too strongly, she wouldn’t be able to defend herself if she was assaulted by another magician or astral entity.

In her dreams, she could see the apocalypse coming - the aliens, the split moon, the green monstrous figure, the feeling of dread. She’d be trapped in a wood, or a cave, or lost at sea. She’d be attacked by dream creatures.

Sometimes she would feel the head-splitting migraines, and would cast spells to stop them, which then worried her even more after the talk at the Delta labs. Casting spells in the realm of dreams probably was just as real as casting them in the real world, so what did that mean to her? Or were they not doing anything?

The last few dreams, though, she’d been drawing protection seals on the ground, blasting out Futhark and Aatlan macros and Ogham (a slash-based Irish runic language), in an effort to protect herself against the dream dangers. And she noticed that after she finished, on a tree nearby, a crow was watching her. She got annoyed and popped a spark at it, and it flew away. But the next dream-night when she was back in the woods, and her protection seal was up, the crow was back.

Finally the third time it appeared, carrying a bloody bit of meat in its beak, Wendy squared off, hands on hips, head throbbing, and gave the crow a glare. “What do you want?” she said, cocking her head. “Am I supposed to be scared? By a crow?”

The crow instead gulped down its snack, then flew down to her circle, looking at it with its head turning this way and that, the blood on its beak gleaming. Finally, it looked at her and said, in perfectly understandable Old Gaelic, “do you mind if I..” and then pointed with a foot at a spot on the circle. Wendy craned over slightly to see that the crow - with a noticeably female voice - was pointing at a section of Ogham slashes. Wendy, mostly because it was a dream, so why the fuck not, gestured to go ahead. Even in a dream, Wendy knew her Ogham - an ancient Irish alternate proto-language consisting mostly of slashes - was not the best.

The crow made an alteration in a slash, added another, and added a modifier. Wendy could see that, bizarrely, it made sense, and she could feel the pulse of Kha quicken through the spot in the circle better.

“It is easy to get the ‘IA’ and the “EA” confused,” the crow said. “It was really bothering me. I mean, your circle is half-mad already. Whew! What a mess of words you have here. And I was very happy to see the Ogham pinning the circle to the Earth, that’s a respectful touch. I just hated to see the mistake.”

“Thanks?”

“Sure. Aye, and also, your Enochian handwriting is awful.” The crow chuckled. “Bad as a drunken monk. Barely functional.”

“You understand the rest of it?” Wendy said. “Oh, certainly,” the crow replied. She hopped up on a nearby rock so she could be more level with Wendy’s head, and continued to look at Wendy. Wendy noticed the iridescence on her wings was more coppery, also like blood. “The Futhark is nothing new,” the crow said. “Using the Aatlan to bind and cast other spells - I’ve never seen it used that way before. Clever clever. Why the rush, though? Why not enjoy the time it takes to draw and speak the full words?”

“Because I’m at fucking war!” Wendy yelled. She put a hand on her face, feeling the hot tears coming. “The whole world is gearing up to come after my homeland, and I’m the only one who can defend it. My husband is dying because of errors I made. And then at night my dreams put me here, where I’m attacked as well. And then there’s that-'' she said, gesturing at the sky. “How am I supposed to stop that!?”

“Ah, well lass, war is something an old crow knows a thing or two about, and I’m actually something of an expert. I’ve eaten my share of the battle-dead, and helped a hero, when they deserved it. And you do have a battle coming. Many of them.” The crow cocked her head, her black eyes twinkling. “I could help.”

Wendy wiped her face, then crossed her arms. “I’m not completely stupid, you know,” Wendy said. “You’re… something else. You aren’t my subconscious whatever. I can sense that you’re some kind of entity, or something. I don’t want to offend, but I’m wary of accepting help from a random dream something I know nothing about.”

“Aye. You’re a clever little witchling, aren’t you? For if I was a man, it would be easy to deduce what I want from you. But another woman… well, we know, I can be friend or foe or both at once.” The crow flapped and stepped closer on the rock, then said, “so in the spirit of trust, we’ll simply trade question for question. Transactional. How’s that? And you can use my wisdom how you like, or not at all, if you please. One Irish lass to another.”

“And why would you help me?” Wendy said.

“Honestly, witchling, I’m bored. There’s not a lot going on where I live these days. I’m curious and interested in the world you come from. For example, I fixed your poor Ogham. So to continue our game, perhaps you can explain what that noisy thing in your pocket is?” it said, pointing with a foot to her skirt pocket.

“What…wait.” Wendy went into her skirt pocket, and even in her dreams, there it was. “It’s a smartphone,” Wendy said, pulling it out. “Heh. To explain this I need to explain a bunch of other things first.”

“Wonderful,” the crow said.

-

THEN: AUGUST 4th, 2016, SIGMA LAB

Everyone anxiously crowded around the TV in the lounge, Xeniya in front, as they flipped looking for news coverage. All of them got the texts from the emergency department at the same time: There was an incident at the Democratic rally in Georgia that President Ashe was speaking at. There was an explosion. Nobody knows if the President is alive, is it an attack-

Xeniya found a reporter - someone from the event, hair messed slightly, dusty looking. “Quiet everyone,” she barked.

“...unknown yet as to the identity of the bomber. No government or group officially claiming responsibility yet. I repeat: there has been a possible attempt on the life of President Gwendolyn Ashe, speaking here at the Atlanta University Center Consortium grounds.”

“Holy shit,” said Xeniya quietly.

The reporter haltingly continued. “About twenty minutes ago, a man on line to ask a question somehow broke through the service agents and police to get close to the stage. Secret Service agents tried to pull the President aside, but President Ashe, apparently… there’s conflicting reports here…”

The shot shakily swung back. An area in front of the slightly raised stage on the ground was scorched and smoldering, with a burning crater in the ground in the middle, and the first few rows of chairs were blown back. The President sat on the edge of the stage, looking disheveled, hair askew, while a medic was checking her over. She was talking to a nearby agent and seemed stunned but unharmed. There were a few people on stretchers but no obvious casualties. The camera then turned back to the reporter.

“Bystanders say President Ashe jumped off the stage and hugged the bomber right before he exploded. Got her arms around him. The explosion seemed to go just… up and down? Not out. There’s no remains of the attacker. That crater goes down into the ground almost six feet! No deaths reported, but there are multiple injuries. The President so far appears unharmed. Wait… she’s coming through. Madam President! President Ashe!”

Several other reporters entered the same shot gathering around the President being escorted off. There was blood and soot on her clothes. She shook off the agent guiding her arm to face the cameras.

“I’m fine. I want to thank the swift response of the Secret Service and local law enforcement. I’m… I have protection. I mean… I’ve got a vest on, it’s uh… it’s very good, and I just didn’t want to see anybody die on my account. Anybody would have done it. Excuse me.” Her Service agents started hustling her out of the camera. The reporter continued to talk, but Xeniya changed the channel, getting another reporter doing an interview with a bystander.

“I’m just grateful to be alive, I guess. Oh my God. I thought, this is it, I’m dead!” a middle aged black woman in business clothes said. “I hadn’t made up my mind yet and wanted to see her in person. I can’t believe she did that. I mean, say what you want about the policies, but having a woman like that in charge, willing to die to protect us, and not dying, I mean that’s pretty amazing.“

Xeniya flipped through a few more interviews of amazed thankful people, all gushing over the President that saved them who was also unhurt, then muted it, and sent everybody back to their jobs. She stayed, looking at the screen and frowning. Her assistant Robert stayed with her, looking at the TV, and then said “...we didn’t give her any of the protection hardware we’d been working on, right?”

“Not yet,” said Xeniya. “Assuming this wasn’t just some kind of illusion, if she just actually redirected a point blank bomb blast, this is a whole new level. This changes her power curve completely.”

Xeniya looked at the footage again on a new channel, re-showing Wendy sitting on the stage. There she is, unharmed. She walks in front of the camera, makes a speech. She looks out at the camera in a rare closeup. Green eyes flashing. Green.

Huh, thought Xeniya. I always thought her eyes were more hazel than green.

-

NOW: BASILICATE TEMPLE, CYPHDOX, 5 MONTHS AFTER THE ATTACK ON THE FESTIVE NIGHTBEAK

Tonight was a holy feast day for the Myriopus Rex Ascendant, the day when the great demi-god Millipus Rex - hir of the thousand tentacles - underwent a fractal expansion and became the Myriopus Rex of the Near Infinite Tentacles and slid from this reality. Cyphishop Dram had noticed during the festivities after the service that a comely Cyph’d nun had looked in hirs direction several times during the evening and once gave hirm a friendly (but courteous) waggle. He’d waved back with his tents, discreetly.

Dram wasn’t quite at an age yet where such things no longer mattered so hir kept her in hirs eyeshot from time to time. She didn’t seem to be interacting with anyone else, so perhaps she was an observer from a different Abbey.

The Cyphipope had hirslef gone to thir chambers, so the night had moved to the “unofficial” mode, where things got a bit looser. As a top-ranking member of the Church, appearances had to be kept, so Dram spent hirs time tasting a delicacy here and there, stopping to talk to executives and wardrobes as needed, even halting to make nice with the occasional Blee and Mbth visiting diplomat. Everybody was talking about the Thirders, of course.

There was talk between the Cyphipope and the heads of the Cyph’d Consortium about the Thirders, and their halting attacks on locations close to their homeworld, Sol, but realistically, it was a joke. One small world, fifteen years ago probed and found pre-space, pre-quantum tech, even if it had gone to space, it would be nothing against the thousand ships of the GCD armada. As soon as the timetable dictated, they would simply turn and crush them like any egg.

Once it was late enough to not be awkward, Dram returned to thir own chambers, peeled off the robes of state and climbed into hirs sleeping pit. After barely a moment to settle down, there was a light chime at the door. He touched a control near the bed to display a holo of the door cam.

It was the young beauty from the party! Dram quickly threw on a robe and clambered over to the door to crack it open. “Yes?” he said.

The young femme Cyph’d blushed prettily and whispered, “My Cyhpishop, forgive my… impertinance, but I followed you from the party. I have not been observed. I wondered if a powerful Cyph’d such as yirself might have a moment to spend?”

Dram smiled and ushered her in. Like any Cyph’d in the spiritual caste, hir was gender-mobile, but in the presence of such a strong radiating femme energy hir could feel hirs masc elements shifting internally and becoming aroused. Dram knew he/hir was attractive, and wielded power, and this wouldn’t be the first time a nun had propositioned him/hirm. Getting her brood larva fertilized by him/hirm would be quite a coup, her young (if viable) well provided for, and of course the experience would be intensely pleasurable.

She coyly flooped and roobled over to his sleep-pit, touching it and cooing at the softness of the pillows, and (now a he) he smiled at her. She let her habit gown slide off revealing her supply, nearly round body. He murmured appreciatively - her brood paunch was visible and quite bulbous and full of larva. He had a thing for big paunches!

He settled back, tents behind his head, as she clambered onto his body, upright. He reached out with two other tents to heft her paunch. “My dear, you never even told me your name,” he said.

She smiled, then extended her upper tents. Suddenly her lower tents wrapped around his body like iron, pinning him down with a strength no Cyph’d should have. One tent clapped over his mouth, silencing his cries. The two raised tents gestured, and a ring of fire roared to life around the pit, trapping them within. From the ring came the shrieks of the damned.

At this moment, Dram noticed something that he had impossibly missed before - that her skin was red, and she had two small horns on her head. In fact, from between her plump lower tents, a tail with a little barb on the end was now visible, flicking about.

She spoke, her voice the same but overlaid with unusual tones and hissing. “My name is Aosoth. You speak Low Beyond, yes? Will you be quiet?” Dram nodded, scared, and she released her tent on his mouth. Low Beyond was a corruption of the spiritual High Beyond spoken in the Church, a supposedly corrupted and evolved version of the First Language, and as such he spoke it well. Switching to Low Beyond, he said, “Who are you?”

“That’s better. Gods, I hate your language. I have to speak mind-to-mind and maintain an illusion of speaking. Ugh. All the pops and gurgles, I don’t know how you stand it.” She looked around his chambers and nodded. “Nice room.”

“Are you going to kill me? How does a Cyph’d nun possess such power?”

“I’m not here to kill you, and I’m not a Cyph’d. I am a Succubus, a seducer from the pit, Octopoid, and I have been summoned. Normally and in ancient times my summoning would to seduce, fuck, and steal the Kha and soul from my chosen target. Tonight, though, I’m just here to give you a message.“

She leaned in closer. Even though he was terrified, he was currently male, and that paunch pushing into his body was becoming distracting. She licked her lips with a forked tongue. “Listen to me now.

“Tell all the members of the GCD, and allies, and fleets and subjects, the following: Stay away from the Thirders. Stay away from Sol. Sol claims all systems, occupied or unoccupied, moving or stable, within a twenty light year radius of Sol. Nobody will enter the Thirder domain without permission. They have purged many major targets within this radius now, and will purge the rest if you don’t withdraw.

“Take heed, roundfood-haters, and leave the Thirder domain alone until such a time as they make official diplomatic overtures, or they will reply in blood and fire. Call a Concordance and inform the GCD. That’s the message.” She sat back up, and the flames dimmed somewhat, just down to an attractive and sexy flicker, the voices reduced to hissing and cooing.

“I don’t get the last bit about the round food.”

“I don’t either, but that was the message,” she said. She stretched her tents above her head, and once again her paunch shimmied. She saw Dram watching and she reached down and hefted it, saying “Nice, right? Big, but not too big? And the lips?” She pouted, then smiled again. “Not bad for a first time! As stupid as this summoning was, it’s nice to incorporate in something new. But,” she said, “that’s all I got, so I should discorporate now.”

“Wait!” said Dram anxiously. “I mean… you went to all the trouble to... incorporate. You sure you don’t want to…” he waggled his masc nethers underneath her suggestively.

She raised an eyeridge, amused. “You still want to fuck? Good gods below, stupid masc sexuality is like a universal constant, isn’t it? I’d have to make off with a bit of your soul, you know.”

“Eh… I’ll risk it,” he said.