Volume 2, Issue 3 The Pirate Issue, 2007 $7.00 JOHN JOSEPH

Volume 2, Issue 3
The Pirate Issue, 2007
$7.00
GUEST EDITED BY
JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS
ILLUSTRATED BY
JAMES OWEN
THE FLYING SPAGHETTI MONSTER
JAMES L. CAMBIAS—J. KATHLEEN CHENEY
JUSTINE GRAYKIN—RAJAN KHANNA—MARISSA K. LINGEN
JILL SNIDER LUM—MELINDA SELMYS—GRANT STONE
JEREMIAH TOLBERT—MIKAL TRIMM—JEN WEST
16
Captain Blood’s B00ty
by Jeremiah Tolbert
Captain Blood, ‘leet most high of the Mystical Order of the
Buccaneers, was dead. Or so said a daemon-posted blog post on his
hidden website at 4:42 PM. And whether it was true or just some
hacker hoax, it was major bad news either way. Either he was dead,
and that sucked, or our enemies had cracked his defenses and
wanted everyone to believe he was dead.
I logged in to my desktop
and checked the status of my
firewall sprogs—all
clear—then started hitting the
tracker sites looking for
weapons. One of the Swedishscene cabals had uploaded a
Truename-enabled
summoning sprog for a
daemon from the Malleficus, so
I jumped on the torrent and
watched it trickle down to my
hard drive. I tried connecting
to my cabal’s IM server to see
what our plan was, but the
server timed out.
That made me nervous. I
cursed under my breath.
“What’s going on?” Seth, my dorm mate, asked from his bed. He
lay sprawled out, surrounded by economics textbooks and notes.
That reminded me that finals were days away. It wasn’t a happy
reminder.
“Just some network trouble,” I said.
“That sucks. Oh, hey. This came for you earlier.” He tossed me a
large manila envelope. I inspected it carefully for unusual auras
before opening it. A hidden metatag glowed brightly to my net-mage
One of the Swedishscene cabals had
uploaded a Truenameenabled summoning
sprog for a daemon from
the Malleficus…
Shimmer
17
sight. Embedded within its skulls and bones was the Captain’s sigil: a
droplet of blood.
I tore open the envelope, triggering the embedded sprogpowered microchip. At once, a four-hundred-pound man with a
tangled gray beard wearing a Firefly t-shirt appeared behind Seth.
“Hello there, Cabalistas,” Captain Blood’s ghost said.
Seth twisted around and said, “Dude! You scared the shi—”
“So if you’re seeing this, I’m dead,” continued the Captain, as if
Seth hadn’t spoken. “When you’re the ‘leetest netmagic pirate to sail
the digital seas, you’re bound to be a target, and we all knew I
couldn’t duck our enemies forever. Don’t waste any tears or time on
me. You have to find my hidden treasure, matey.”
“Why is there a crazy person in our room?” Seth asked.
I waved him out of the way and made shushing sounds. He
hesitantly took a seat on his bed.
“If you’re smart enough, you’ll find it before our enemies do,” the
Captain’s ghost was saying. “Use the map I’ve sent you and keep it
safe. If the MAA gets this, everything we stand for will be destroyed.”
The Captain raised his hand and saluted, then vanished into a
cloud of Cheeto-colored smoke. I dug through the envelope and
found a small USB thumb-drive, but nothing else.
Seth leapt from the bed and stuck his head out into the hall. He
must not have seen anything, because he turned back to me with a
mixture of amused anger and confusion.
“What the hell was that about?” Seth demanded. “Are you in
some kind of cult? I specifically wrote on my roommate application
form, ‘No Cults.’”
“Uh, yeah, about that...” I had a sprog that would make Seth
forget the apparition, but when I turned back to my computer to
access it, I found it under someone else’s control. It helpfully
indicated this fact in bright red letters.
WE ARE IN CONTROL OF YOUR COMPUTER. PLEASE
REMAIN SEATED WHILE WE ACCESS YOUR FILES. -MAA
“Shit. We need to leave, like, five seconds ago,” I said.
I grabbed my bag and pushed Seth out the door with me,
18
Captain Blood’s B00ty
slamming the door shut just as the computer shot purple lightning
bolts in every direction.
“Your computer just tried to electrocute you,” Seth said numbly. I
tugged his arm and led him down the hall as fast as I could manage
after a semester’s diet of Mountain Dew and pepperoni pizza.
“Yeah, about that,” I said. “I am kind of in a cult. Well, a cabal
anyway. We used to steal magic and distribute it to the masses.
Now…now we’re screwed.”
I was talking too fast. Seth had a look in his eyes like he might try
to bolt. I took my PDA out of my bag. It was a third generation Palmclone, with a 250 mHz processor overclocked to 350, just powerful
enough to run a few public domain protective spells I’d crunched
myself from The Long Lost Friend. I thumbed up one called A Breeze
Erases Footprints In The Dust and fed a meg of mojo into it. All it would
do is slow down my pursuers, but I needed time to think.
“Dude! Your computer—”
“Here’s the short explanation,” I said. “Magic’s held in strict
copyright by a bunch of immortal pricks who have an organization
called the MAA. You’ve heard of the RIAA, right? Recording
Industry Association of America?”
“Of course.”
“Well, the MAA is the Magical Association of Atlantis, and
instead of suing you for illegally downloading, they banish you from
existence, or worse.”
“What’s worse than being banished from existence?”
“You don’t want to know. So the MAA has a monopoly on
magic. But there are rogue graybeards who don’t think that should
be.”
“Like the guy who appeared in our room?”
“Right,” I said, mentally adding +1 to his Respect score.
Seth nodded. “Wait, where are we going? The mental health
center is the other direction.” He pointed calmly.
“Funny. I need mojo. I’m just about tapped out, so we need a safe
access point.”
“Where’s safety?” he asked, shoulders slumping. “What the hell’s
mojo?”
Shimmer
19
“The energy that powers spells,” I said. “Safety may be another
net-mage’s inner sanctum, if we’re lucky. I know one who lives not
too far from campus.” I let go of Seth’s arm, but he continued to
follow as we cut across the quad.
“Hey, I haven’t illegally downloaded any magic.”
I stopped. “True,” I said. “You could go back to the room if you
want.”
“With the computer-turned-lightning-death-machine?”
“Yeah.” I started off again. “Guess you better keep up.”
Our destination was the Kappa Kappa Theta sorority house. We
paused for a minute outside on the neatly manicured, still-green
lawn so that we could catch our breath and plot a way inside.
“There’s a sorority girl who pirates magic?”
“Yeah. Matchmaker231.”
“I can’t believe you know a sorority girl. Those chicks are way out
of your league.”
“Uh, yeah.” I sniffed.
“You do know her, right?”
“I know of her. It’s her knowing me that is tricky.”
“We’re breaking in, aren’t we?”
“I prefer to call it ‘taking sanctuary.’”
“I’m sure the cops will buy that, Quasimodo.”
The house was dark. On the Saturday night before finals week,
campus was crazy with parties. I happened to know that the Kappa
Kappas were busy partying it up with their brother fraternity, so I
figured it would be safe for me to break into Matchmaker231’s
sanctum to use her machine. And even if MAA were tracking us,
another practitioner’s protective spells would confuse them long
enough for me to regroup.
Getting into the building was easy enough. Someone had left a
window open just a crack on the fire escape on the second floor. An
ashtray sat on the wrought-iron railing as explanation. Once inside,
we headed to the third floor, where I could feel the throb of magic.
We stopped outside the room. Seth looked to me.
“Aren’t you going to magic open the door or something?”
20
Captain Blood’s B00ty
I checked my PDA and found that my protective spell was
minutes away from burning through every last megabyte of mojo I
had left. That was the problem with public domain sprogs: They
were mojo-hogs.
“Looks like we’ll have to do it the old fashioned way,” I said. I
stepped back to bash the door with my shoulder, but Seth stopped
me. He reached into the pockets of his too-tight hipster jeans and
pulled out a student ID and went to work.
After a minute or so, the swung the door open.
“Dude, how did—” I began.
“Just kidding,” Seth said. “It wasn’t even locked.”
“If the cops do catch us, I am selling you out to our cellmates for a
pack of smokes.”
Inside, Matchmaker’s room was surprisingly spare. A few photos
of smiling sorority bimbos in various vampish poses were pinned to
the wall above a neatly made bed. A yellow curtain covered the
entrance to the closet on the opposite wall. Along the third wall was a
cheap Ikea desk with a decidedly not cheap dual-core Intel
Macintosh. It hummed with magic potential.
I cackled and took a seat. The lumbar support was all wrong, and
it took me a few seconds of adjustments before I was ready. Seth
paced nervously behind me.
“What should I do?” he asked.
“Watch in the hall and tell me if you see anyone coming.” I rested
my fingers on the keyboard. The slight pressure caused the password
prompt to appear. I fed my remaining mojo into the best cracking
sprog I had; the prompt disappeared and the machine gave me a
desktop. I connected the thumb-drive and my PDA.
I felt naked with no mojo, but I knew I should look at the contents
of the thumb-drive first. I opened it and found a single text file.
Opening that, I found myself staring at a list of what must have been
at least three-hundred thousand IP addresses. Odd, and probably
worthless to our current situation. It could take weeks to fully scan
the IPs and look for ways into the machines. Just hiding something
on one of the machines would be too simple for the Captain. There
had to be a trick.
Shimmer
21
But to investigate further, I’d need more mojo. I tried my most
secret of stashes: a completely anonymous Gmail account. It was still
active, so I began copying the attachments I’d mailed to myself from
my warez servers, ten megabytes in size each, to the PDA’s drive
while I scrolled through the IP addresses. What the hell was Captain
trying to tell me with them? It was going to take some serious
processing power to find a pattern in the numbers, assuming one
even existed. My PDA wasn’t going to cut it.
Just then, I felt a pair of hands rest upon my shoulders. They
began to massage gently. I let out a small moan and leaned back into
the hands. They were strong and confident, and knew just where my
stress rested.
The next few minutes are a little hazy, but I think they involved
Seth and I making out like a couple of high school freshman. Now,
I’m completely straight, and, as far as I know, so is Seth, but you never
know with those hipsters, and anyway, I don’t want to go into detail,
but things were most definitely not natural—and I don’t mean that as
a commentary on life style choices.
We had fallen under one of Matchmaker’s defensive spell
programs. Total rookie mistake on my part.
We were going at it for at least twenty minutes. As Seth’s tongue
oh-so-gently probed my ear, I caught a glimpse of a woman shaking
with barely contained laughter in the doorway. She wore a slinky
black dress and propped herself against the door frame like she had
been drinking. Her dark hair was done up in curls.
Molly., a/k/a Matchmaker231. She was the only girl in Larrytown
for me. Normally, I kind of wanted to screw her senseless and do
other obscene things to her. Up until now, I had thought that she
didn’t know that I existed, which was how I liked it, given that I was a
spineless coward when it came to women.
“Thank you, Santa!” she said cheerfully.
“Could you...mmm... please cancel the sprog,” I said.
“But you look like you’re having fun,” she said.
“Oh God, please—his ear wax tastes awful,” Seth mumbled.
Matchmaker sighed, and the spell lifted. Seth and I separated
quickly and kept the width of the room between us.
22
Captain Blood’s B00ty
“I needed access to a sanctum, and you were the closest. I can pay
you mojo later—”
“I don’t want your pirate-boy mojo,” she said softly.
“It’s better than the Quizzer stuff you use,” I snapped.
“Wait—you know who I am?” I felt a stupid hormonal charge from
her having heard of me.
“The thrill of the illicit does not make it better,” she said, then
marched into the room. She jerked my connections from her machine
and threw them at me. I barely caught the thumb-drive, and I
pocketed it quickly. “Of course I know who you are. I work social
magic. I know every practitioner in a seventy-seven mile radius.”
“Hey—that was an odd kind of defensive spell, you know,” I said,
changing the subject quickly. “What if I had broken in by myself?”
“There’s a vibrator in the closet,” she said curtly. “Now tell me
exactly why you thought I would let you get away with invading my
private space. In ten words or less.”
“Mentor killed. Cabal mateys busted. Need mojo. Find hidden
treasure.”
“Ten on the nose,” Seth said.
“Who’s your boyfriend?” she asked.
“He’s uninitiated,” I said.
“I’m Seth,” he said. “Sorry we, uh, broke in.”
“I’m Molly,” she said with a surprisingly sweet smile. “What’s this
about treasure?”
I gave her the short version.
“I heard rumors that the MAA was launching a crackdown on you
nerds,” she said. “I read on MySpace that your captain has the
unduplicatius.”
I laughed. “The unduplicatius is a myth.”
“What else would be so important that the MAA would take out
your entire cabal and kill the Captain? He might have been rogue, but
he was still a graybeard like the rest of them,” Molly said. She began
to pace the room between Seth and me.
“If Captain Blood had the unduplicatius sprog, then he would
have destroyed it.”
“What are you, a noob?” Molly sneered. “It can’t be destroyed.”
Shimmer
23
“What the hell is the undiplodocus?” Seth asked.
“Unduplicatius,” I corrected. “It’s an urban legend among
wizards. It is a spell that cannot be copied. Anything it is cast upon
becomes its Platonic ideal.”
“Ahhh.” He paused. “And that means?”
“The target can’t be copied, and any copies already made are
erased from existence,” Molly said, waving her hands. “Story time
over—” A look of horror slowly worked across her face. Her eyes
were fixed on the screen just behind me.
“We run now?” I asked.
She nodded. All three of us bolted from the room. Molly snatched
a laptop bag from the behind the door just before slipping past me
and down the stairwell, straight for the fire escape.
The second story exploded a few seconds later. There were more
loud, scary sounds as we put more distance behind us. I caught the
glimpse of the sorority house in the reflection of a parked car’s
windshield as we ran. Something with four-story tall tentacles was
demolishing Kappa Kappa Theta.
“See!” Molly shouted. “It has to be the unduplicatius!”
I admitted that she could be right.
Molly took the lead and ran down streets and alleys until, out of
breath, we stopped somewhere in the downtown district. Revelers
stumbled past the entrance to our alley of refuge, singing drunkenly.
I felt like throwing up.
“That was pretty cool,” Seth said. He giggled. “A giant squid thing
ate your house.”
“Well, he’s cracked,” Molly said. “You okay?”
“Yes,” I said. So she punched me in the gut. It really hurt!
“Asshole! A little bit of love magic here and there, that’s all I was in
for. At worst, they might make me ugly, turn my skin green. I wasn’t a
threat! And then you show up with your treasure crap and they eat.
My. House.”
I contemplated running for my life, but two marathons were more
than enough for one day. “I have an idea,” I said instead.
24
Captain Blood’s B00ty
Molly stopped in mid-windup for another punch. “Talk.”
“The map looks like a series of IP addresses. I think that they
might be crunchable, though, through the Alda-Maphen Equation. If
we had the processing power, we could decode the map and find the
unduplicatius—”
“I don’t hear anything in your plan about getting the MAA off our
backs,” she said, her tone ominous.
“Then we hand over the unduplicatius for our lives?” I said,
wincing at the idea even though I’d brought it up.
“We can’t do that!” Seth said, horrified. “Can we do that?”
“No, Seth. Giving the MAA the unduplicatius will destroy
everything the rogues have worked for,” Molly said.
“Well, how do they keep finding us, man?” Seth asked.
“Sympathetic magic is my guess,” I said.
“What?” Seth blinked.
“If you have a little bit of someone,” I said, “you can work all
kinds of magic on them. Hair, blood, teeth, whatever. It’s the really
old stuff. Only for digital practioners like us, things like social
security numbers or driver’s license numbers work just the same.
They’re part of our identity, just like our hair or teeth.”
“If your captain was compromised, then they have access to all
that information,” Molly pointed out. “The rogue graybeards are
really anally retentive about knowing everything about their
recruits. I had to give a drop of blood to my mentor.
“We’ve got to get the sprog and trade it to them for our safety,” she
said, coming around to my plan.
“Right. But none of this will matter if they beat us to the sprog,”
I said, starting to pace now. “Captain Blood said that he sent the
same map to everyone in my cabal, so I’m sure MAA is already
working on crunching it. We need to crunch it too. And there’s only
one cabal I know of that has more processing power than the
MAA.”
She shook her head. “No way. I am not talking to those weirdos.”
“Who?” Seth asked.
“The Spam Kings,” I said.
“Spammers?” Seth frowned. “They’re wizards?”
Shimmer
25
They’re part oƒ our identity, just like our hair or teeth.
“You don’t think anyone actually buys the crap in their messages,
do you?” I shook my head. “And have you noticed that half the spam
you get isn’t even selling anything anymore? Each spam contains a
tiny bit of sprog code, and it steals from you—takes the energy you
waste reading it and then sends it back to the Spam Kings. They have
the biggest stores of mojo of anybody. Enough to knock the Earth out
of orbit, some say. On top of all that mojo, they have a huge network
of zombie machines that send the spam, which they can use to crunch
sprogs or whatever they want.”
“They sound dangerous,” Seth said, frowning.
“Exactly,” Molly said. “Nobody knows anything about them. We
can’t trust them.”
26
Captain Blood’s B00ty
“I know that the MAA hates them as much as the MAA hates
pirates, and the enemy of my enemy blah blah blah,” I said. “Unless
you have a better idea?”
She paused. “Not at the moment.”
“Good,” I said. “Let’s break out that laptop of yours and find a
wireless signal.”
In an hour, we had our first spam. It took another hour for me to
trace its headers back to the zombie that sent it. Spam Kings used oldfashioned, mundane hacking to take over poorly firewalled
computers and turn them into spam-sending machines. It was easy
enough to let ourselves in through the same doors and then close
them. We spent another hour tracing more spam, shutting down
zombie machines, and leaving our calling card: a text file with
instructions for how to contact us.
After twenty disinfections, we had an email from:
Dear Sirs,
I hope this message finds you well. Christ be with you. Please be stopping
with your attacks. What do you want?
Sincerely,
King Abu Il-Najara XI
“We have contact,” I said, pausing. “But I’m not so sure about
this.”
“Tell them what we want,” said Molly.
So I did. Five more minutes, and we had our response:
Such a transaction as this will be costly to you. Please provide access to
1.01 TB of goods (username and password please to safe store) in order for
transaction to proceed. Christ be With You.
I blinked.
“One point one terabytes?” Molly said in wonder.
“What’s the big deal?” Seth asked. “Collect up some mojo so we
can pay them.”
“It took me a year to save up a hundred gigs of mojo from my mp3
servers,” I said numbly.
Shimmer
27
“I saved up half as much from my Livejournal quizzes,” Molly
said, looking embarrassed. Practioners are always comparing mojo
stash sizes, and nobody likes to have the smallest one in a room, if
you know what I mean.
Seth rolled his eyes from side to side, doing the math. “Well, shit.”
We sat in silence for a too-long moment. I contemplated e-mailing
the MAA to turn myself in and finish the whole business. Molly
spoke up before I could begin writing my surrender.
“My turn,” she said.
We hired an off-duty cabbie to drive us from Larrytown to Kansas
City. For the first ten minutes, I refused to speak with Molly.
“Hey, you were the one that suggested we deal with the Spam
Kings,” she said over Seth, who sat wedged between us, his personal
space like a neutral zone.
I said nothing.
“These guys are no worse,” she said.
“They’re disgusting,” I said. “I can’t believe you know them!”
Molly laughed. “You’re such a prig. Don’t tell me you never watch
porn.”
“Since I learned that they were making mojo off me when I did,
no!” I whispered in a shrill voice.
“Only if you get off,” Molly said, grinning.
“Heh heh. Pornomancer,” Seth rolled the word around in his
mouth, seeming to enjoy it like a six-year-old enjoys a new swear. “I
never would have guessed you would be so cool to hang out with,
Molly.”
I turned to face the window and did my best to block out Molly
and Seth’s conversation. What I did, and what Molly did to get mojo,
was harmless. Spam Kings and Pornomancers manipulated people.
It was black magic, and I didn’t want anything to do with it. But I had
been quick to use the Spam Kings, hadn’t I? Maybe she was right, and
I was a prig, but there was nothing wrong with that.
The cabbie followed Molly’s directions down into the industrial
district alongside the river, an area of run-down warehouses that
would soon be turned into lofts but in the meanwhile were the
28
Captain Blood’s B00ty
natural habitat of sleezeballs like Molly’s contact, a man named
Clint.
Clint. Even his name sounded like a perverted sex act.
We were met at the door of the warehouse by two real meathead
bodyguards. They patted us down, and they took Molly’s laptop bag.
One held a tablet PC and I felt a low-level scanning sprog looking us
over. He nodded, and the other opened the door for us.
Just inside the threshold, a tall, thin, acid-blond man pounced on
Molly. The sudden movement made me squeak embarrassingly and
sent Seth into a half-assed karate pose.
“Darling! So good of you to drop in and see us,” he said, accent
sounding like the villain of a Die Hard film. “We’re just getting ready
to film a three-way with Rockford, do you want to watch?” Clint
fiddled one of his fifteen facial piercings.
“Sorry,” Molly said, smiling so sweetly again. “We need a favor,
Clint. I was hoping you could help, no questions asked.”
“No questions asked?” Clint shrugged. “Sure, sure. What is this
favor?”
Molly gave him the number. I expected him to go ballistic, but he
merely smiled softly.
“We can arrange for this, if you are willing to agree to my proposal
previously discussed,” Clint said.
“Proposal? Like, what, marriage?” Seth asked, deadpan.
“Silly boy. You’re nice, I like you. I want her to star in one of my
little clips. She has the look that sells so well, you know?”
“No fu—” I began, but Molly elbowed me in the stomach and I
gasped for air, leaving my protest half-voiced.
“Done.” She handed Clint a scrap of paper. “Send the login info
here, would you?”
“For you, darling, anything!”
I wanted to kick his smiling teeth in. But Clint waved us away, and
Molly dragged me back outside.
“Now what?” Seth asked.
“We go back in there and tell him no deal,” I said.
“We find an access point and send the map to the Spam Kings,”
Molly said, pretending as if I had said nothing at all.
Shimmer
29
“I can’t let you , uh, debase yourself over a stupid sprog,” I said.
“That stupid sprog is going to buy me my continued existence,”
Molly snapped. “And the only reason I’m involved is because you got
me to be. You don’t get to say a damn thing about it.” She inhaled
deeply and smoothed out her dress. “Now. Find wireless. Send map.
Save our lives. Okay?”
After a pause, I said, “Okay.”
We found a run-down coffee shop off the business district that was
still open and set up camp at a corner table. While Seth bought the
coffee, I decided it was time to have a private conversation with
Molly.
“I’m sorry about this,” I said. “I didn’t mean to involve you.”
Molly glared for a moment, then relaxed and shrugged. “I was
bored tonight anyway. Forget about it. Let’s get the sprog and then
we can calm things with Big Mother.”
There was an awkward silence. One of the barristas put on a Beth
Orton CD.
“So, uh. You really use magic to match up couples?” I asked.
“What’s weird about that?”
“Nothing. Nothing. It’s just... the Mystical Order of the
Buccaneers thinks on a larger scale is all. I think it’s cute.” Jesus, Seth
was taking his time.
“Making the love lives of people better is ‘cute’ and ‘small scale?’”
She raised her voice, then caught herself and quieted down.
“Sorry, no I didn’t mean it that way—” I said quickly.
“Whatever. Magic worked large is dangerous. And at least we’re
responsible. You pirate freaks giving any old spell to anyone who can
download it, that’s—”
“Hey, at least we respect people enough to give them a choice. The
MAA thinks magic is too good for people like you and me. Safety?
Bullshit. It’s about power, and history has shown that the world
doesn’t end when you give power to the people. It gets better.”
“The power to vote and the power to turn your neighbor into a
toad are not the same thing,” she said.
“You’re right, voting is stronger,” I said.
30
Captain Blood’s B00ty
“This conversation just turned into an after-school special,” she
said. We laughed. Seth finally returned with the drinks.
“Any word from the Spam Kings?” he asked.
Molly checked the laptop screen. She shook her head. “Not yet.”
“It might take a while longer for them to crunch it. Let’s give them
time,” I said.
“If we get out of this alive, you are totally teaching me magic,”
Seth said. “I should be studying right now.”
I groaned. “Don’t remind me. I am so going to flunk out. I’m not
sure studying would help at this point.”
“You’ve been spending a lot of time at the library,” Seth said.
“Give yourself some credit.”
“Not studying. Reading occult books in the rare books room,
looking for more spells to crunch and turn into sprogs. You’d be
surprised at the stuff they have right on campus.”
“Really?” Molly raised an eyebrow. “Anything good?”
“Sure, lots.” I was about to go on when the laptop chirped.
Molly read, gnawing her lip.
“So?” Seth asked.
“Spam Kings say we’re idiots,” Molly said. “The list didn’t crunch
out to anything.”
I said a very, very dirty word.
“Wait, there’s more. They say there is a pattern to the list, though.
They’re all game servers for various MMOGs.”
“Game servers have good security,” I said.
“The list is of every MMOG game server but one,” Molly said.
Seth grinned. “One of those ‘hide it in plain sight’ kind of things.”
“We’ll have to take their word for it then,” I said. “Which server,
what game?”
“Morditus in Lands of Deadly Combat,” Molly reported. “So the
sprog is a file on a game server? Did Captain Blood mean treasure
literally?” Molly asked, looking at me.
I had always wondered how Captain made his mojo. Game
programmer made sense. And from what I had read, Lands of Deadly
Combat had millions of players, all spending hours and hours
playing.
Shimmer
31
Wow. Thinking about the amount of mojo that could generate
nearly rebooted my brain.
“Those things will kill your social life,” I finally said. “I never play.”
“You don’t have a social life.” Molly said, grinning.
“I have other interests,” I said, and sniffed dramatically. “Do you
play?” I asked Molly.
“I do have a social life,” she said.
We turned to look at Seth.
“Hey, I’m too cool for online games,” he said, but he stammered
just a little bit. And he was a tad red-cheeked, like he always was
when I came in after he had the door locked and had taken his time
letting me in.
“Dude,” I said. “You don’t have a porn problem? All those times
you had the door locked—”
“Totally jerking it, I swear.”
Totally lying, more like.
He deflated. “I have a level eighty orc warlord,” he said in a small
voice.
I grabbed him and shook him by the shoulders. “You beautiful
bastard, I thought you were a pervert, but instead, you’re a geek!”
“One of us, one of us,” Molly chanted, and slid the laptop across
the table to Seth.
“Any idea what treasure it is?” I asked.
“The Staff of Erasure,” Seth said. “No one has ever beat the
pirate’s ghost that guards it. The ghost is impervious to all damage,
man!”
“Could you do it?” I asked.
“I’ve tried!” Seth cried. “It’s impossible.”
“What if you used magic?” Molly asked.
“It’s immune to my spells,” he said.
“Just go for it,” I said, booting my PDA. “This time, you’ll have
real magic.”
“Let’s kick some pirate ass,” Molly said, and Seth logged in.
MMOG games may be fun to play, but watching them is about as
entertaining as watching a really bad foreign film with no subtitles.
32
Captain Blood’s B00ty
There was a lot of blood, pretty lights, and random numbers flying
around on the screen.
Four hours later, Seth’s green-skinned avatar stood triumphant
over the hovering transparent corpse of a pirate ghost, its face a
crudely polygonal copy of Captain Blood’s, barely recognizable. The
captain had coded the actual challenge of fighting the ghost to be a
piece of cake for someone who knew what to look for; it was full of
hidden exploit codes that common detection sprogs lit up like a
Christmas tree. The victory was a little bittersweet for me, and it left
me once again tapped for mojo.
Once Seth’s character picked up the Staff, we began receiving a
file from the game’s server. “We’ll have it any minute now,” Seth
said.
The lights flickered, and the barristas froze in place behind the
counter. I checked the progress bar on the computer. It had halted at
ninety-nine percent. Seth wasn’t moving either. Molly, however, was
freaking out.
“Big Mother has found us!” She tried to close the laptop’s screen,
but it wouldn’t budge.
I waited for the inevitable, but it didn’t come. No dark-suited
thugs burst through door, magic wands blazing.
“Weird,” I said.
A white vapor coalesced somewhere near the espresso machine.
It slowly took the form of Captain Blood, bedecked in full pirate
captain garb, boots, sword, and all. He grinned.
“Good job, matey,” he said, his voice cold as winter’s equinox.
“You’ve found the treasure and killed its digital guardian.” The
apparition squinted at us. “Woah, a girl. Who are you?” He leered at
her until I waved my hand and got his attention again.
“The MAA is on to us! We’re going to have to turn it over to them
or they’re going to wipe us out.”
Captain Blood laughed heartily. “Don’t be a noob, kid. Use the
Force! By which I mean, the unduplicatius.” With that, he faded away,
and time restored itself.
“It’s done,” Seth said, jubilant.
“What the hell did that mean?” Molly asked.
Shimmer
33
“What do you think would happen if we cast the unduplicatus on
ourselves?” I asked, gnawing on an unpleasant idea.
“Hmm. We’d become our platonic ideals, and all copies of us
would be destroyed. Maybe memories, even? Informational
constructs aren’t my specialty.”
“My own family wouldn’t even know who I am?” asked Seth. He
slumped across the table.
“Not to mention our school records, everything. Although with
my grades going this way, maybe this wouldn’t be so bad,” I said.
“Wait!” Molly clapped her hands together and bounced in her
seat. “I have it. We don’t cast the sprog on us—”
We both came to the same conclusion. “We cast it on our IDs,” I
said. Molly nodded for me to continue. “The MAA is tracking us with
digital sympathetic magic. So we create our One True Driver’s
Licenses, and poof goes the rest, right?”
The lights began to flicker again. “I think you better just
decide now,” Seth said. “I feel like I’m about to throw up my
kidneys.”
I felt it, too. It was that peculiar sensation of turning inside-out
that only came with something... infernal being written into the
World Object Model. A demon was on its way. The MAA had found
us again.
“Quick, empty your pockets!” Molly shouted. The rumble was
growing louder, almost deafening. The temperature was rising, too.
Seth and I scrambled to comply.
We dumped our driver’s licenses and other IDs onto the table.
Three pennies from Seth’s pocket fell into the pile too, but before I
could do remove them, Molly had traced a circle around them and
initiated the sprog. Waves of magical energy washed out of the
laptop and I could feel it writing to my own record in the World
Object Model.
The power went out. The heat faded, and the vomit-yourself-todeath sensation vanished. The only light in the room was from the
soft glow of the laptop’s screen, running on battery power.
“Dang,” I said. I waited. Nothing ate me.
“I just thought of something,” Seth said in the dark.
34
Captain Blood’s B00ty
“What?” Molly asked.
“Does this mean we’ll never have to pay taxes?”
School had no record of any of us. On the plus side, we got to skip
finals. It’s hard to take classes when you don’t have a transcript. I
don’t think anyone on campus was too focused on them though;
everyone was busy speculating about the great Penny
Disappearance. With my computer fried, I was watching a lot of
television, and one pundit said that, whatever the cause, the U.S. was
better without one cent coins. Nobody was talking much about the
trouble the government was having in making more.
The downside was, Seth and I were out of a home. Housing
understood our plight, really, they did, but they had no files for us, so
out we went to make room for incoming freshmen. Reapply over the
winter break, they said. We’ll find you something.
Yeah, right. We traded one of the platonic pennies for a month’s
free rent at a motel near campus. They were worth a hell of a lot more
than that, but we needed a place to crash.
We spent the rest of finals week hanging out on the quad, talking
about the unduplicatius, wondering if MAA might try to come after us
still. Captain Blood had possessed the spell, but he’d never been
willing to use it. He may have been a rogue, but he was still
conservative about magic in weird ways. I figured our brashness had
the MAA graybeards worried. It was buying us time, but who knew
how much.
I taught Seth about magic—or what I could without a computer
anyway, and I promised to teach him more. I was going to need a new
cabal if I continued with magic. Something I wasn’t too sure about.
Three close calls with oblivion were enough for me at the moment.
The last day before winter break, Molly tracked us down, and the
three of us went for coffee.
“You have to agree that some magic shouldn’t be shared with
anyone,” Molly said. I made a note that caffeine made her preachy.
“If you could copy the unduplicatius and give it away, would you?”
“No,” I said. “I think you’re right.” So she gave me a hug. I
resolved right then to let her win more arguments in the future.
Shimmer
35
“So, where have you been?” Seth asked.
“Making porn,” she said, like your mother says “making
cupcakes.”
“Cool. What’s that site’s URL, anyway?” Seth asked innocently. I
was totally going to curse him with genital warts when I had mojo
again.
“Don’t bother,” she said. “You won’t find me on there.”
“Oh yeah? Why not?” I asked.
“Unduplicatius,” she said with a smug look, then laughed at our
expressions, which were, to say the least, mixed. “It’ll take dinner
and a movie at least before you see me naked.” Then she leaned over
and gave Seth a quick kiss on the cheek. Our expressions weren’t the
only thing mixed.
Seth and I exchanged a series of looks in the secret language of
college men. Rough translation: WTF? Pause for the realization to hit.
Oh, it’s on.
So I was going to need a new computer after all. The poor bastard
didn’t know what he was getting into, competing with a net-mage of
my caliber for a girl. There were curses that needed downloading.
Nothing too serious, of course. I’m thinking a nice 1.0 curse.
Something that causes itching in all the wrong places…
Shimmer
123
Contributors
The Barbary Shore—James L. Cambias is a writer and
game designer. Originally from the pirate haven of
New Orleans, he now lives in pirate-infested western
Massachusetts. He is a partner in Zygote Games, a
small publisher of science-based card and board
games. His fiction has appeared in The Magazine of
Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Journal of PulsePounding Narratives, and original story anthologies.
He prefers the term “privateer.”
A Hand for Each—J. Kathleen Cheney is a former
teacher and has taught mathematics ranging from
7th grade to Calculus. She is currently taking a
sabbatical to concentrate on writing, and some of her
works have been published in Baen's Universe,
Between Kisses and The Sword Review. She is a member
of the Carpe Libris Writers Group, Broad Universe,
and the Oklahoma Speculative Fiction Syndicate.
Her website can be found at jkathleencheny.com
The Perfect Hook—Justine Graykin majored in
Philosophy and English with a minor in Religious
Studies, co-founded and edited a radical
underground ‘zine in the eighties, then did the
married-six-cats-two-dogs-ditto-kids thing. Above
all, she is a writer. To know the writer, read the
writing. That is what matters.
The Furies—Rajan Khanna lives in New York with
his cats, Chloe and Muppet. In addition to writing
fiction, Rajan also writes songs and plays the piano
and the guitar. He hasn't touched the saxophone in
years. This is his first publication.
124
Contributors
Pirates by Adeline Thromb Age 8—Marissa K. Lingen
lives in Minnesota with two large men and one small
dog. She is currently working on a fantasy novel
whose protagonist is the Evil Regent. There is less
hand-rubbing and evil laughter than you might
expect. But only a little less.
The Sweet Realm—Jill Snider Lum lives in Toronto,
Canada, with a husband who believes cats are evil
aliens and a son currently obsessed with building
starships out of Lego. She has worked as a
gemologist, a computer programmer, a historical
interpreter, and a janitor, and enjoys writing about
things that are unusual or amusing, preferably both
at once.
The Blackguard of God—Melinda Selmys has at
various times lived in the woods as a hermit,
reformed the Ontario electoral system, dated a fallen
angel, opened a homeless shelter, home-schooled
children and made food fit for the beatific vision. Her
favorite Vatican document is Mulieris Dignitatem and
her favorite poisonous mushroom is Amanita
Muscaria. She writes from Etobicoke.
Hard Times for Bartleby Crow—Grant Stone lives in
Auckland, New Zealand with his wife and two
daughters. At the impressionable age of 11, he was
introduced to the Apple II computer and The
Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, thereby sealing both
his professional and literary fates. He sometimes
blogs at http://d1sc0r0b0t.blogspot.com. This is his
first publication.
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125
Captain Blood’s B00ty—Jeremiah Tolbert is a webaddicted nerd living in Colorado. He knows
absolutely nothing at all about real internet piracy,
whether of a magical or mundane nature. His
writing has previously appeared in Interzone, the
Fantasy anthology, and All-Star Zeppelin Adventure
Stories. Seriously, he doesn't know anything at all
about bittorrents or P2P networking, so quit
bringing it up.
Come to the Islands—Mikal Trimm writes
speculative fiction and poetry, and his works have
appeared (or will soon appear) in a multitude of
venues including the Polyphony anthos, Strange
Horizons, Black Gate, Weird Tales, and Interfictions. He
can also give you a sordid story about one of the
Shimmer editors after a certain WFC party…
An Inconvenient Pirate—Jen West is a freelance
writer. She's sold numerous interviews, articles and
features to various newspapers, magazines and
websites, including a previous interview co-written
with her husband, Ken Scholes, in Shimmer's
Summer 2006 issue. She currently resides with Ken
and two pudgy cats in St. Helens, OR where she is
always looking for that next interesting character or
story to introduce to the world.
126
Artists & Illustrations
James A. Owen has been working professionally as an illustrator
and storyteller for more than two decades. To date, in addition to
numerous illustration and design projects, James has written and
illustrated the six-volume Essential Starchild graphic novel series, and
his novel Here, There Be Dragons was published by Simon & Schuster
in the Fall of 2006. At least six more books in the series are planned,
and foreign rights have been sold in fourteen countries. James works
at the Coppervale Studio, a 14,000 square foot, century-old restored
church in Northeastern Arizona.
Jeremy Owen has worked as a stonemason, a carpenter, an artist,
a writer, an animatronics engineer, and more. He collaborated with
his brother James on the book Lost Treasures of the Pirates of the
Caribbean, which was published by Simon & Schuster in 2007. He
lives with his family in Silvertown, Arizona, where he is the
production manager at the Coppervale Studio, and is at work on his
first novel.
For more information visit www.coppervaleinternational.com
or coppervale.livejournal.com.
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127
Shimmery Staff
Beth Wodzinski’s (Editor-in-chief) fiction has
appeared in Quantum Muse and Bewildering Stories. She
tests software for a living and admits to a fondness for
reality TV.
E. Catherine Tobler (Editor) climbed mountains in a
bright yellow coat, with shoes that made her feel like a
clown. She endured. Writing is not that much different.
Lisa Mantchev (Editor) lives in the Pacific Northwest.
Her work has appeared at Strange Horizons,
Futurismic.com, and in the SFWA anthology New Voices
in Science Fiction.
Catherine Knutsson (Associate Editor) is a graduate of
the University of Victoria (Art History) and the Royal
Conservatory of Music. Her writing has been featured
in DKA, Quantum Muse, and Forgotten Worlds.
Mary Robinette Kowal (Art Director) is a puppeteer and
award-winning designer. She has stories in Strange
Horizons, All-Star Stories: Twenty Epics, and Apex Digest.
Cheryl Walton (Copy Editor) is a marketing and
technical writer; she writes fiction, owns a pair of
leather jeans and two poodles, and she will work for
margaritas.
Sunil Sebastian (Editorial Assistant) is a technology
consultant who can't really explain his job but assures
you that he's really good at it. He writes fiction with the
hope of one day being successful enough that people
will call him "eccentric" instead of "crazy.”
Special thanks to proofreaders Michael Livingston,
Anne Zanoni and Deborah Laws!
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