Bound God

Chapter 10: The Cheapest Wizard Alive

[9:06 p.m.]

Lastlight: whoa. wizard. temper much

Coin: How can you tell?

Lastlight: because you just challenged creeper. in front of the whole board. over one nice word about BND

Coin: He called BND one of the last honest intelligence services on earth.

Lastlight: he was being ironic, you maniac

Coin: He wrote it where people could read it. That was a choice.

Lastlight: that's what posting is, yes

Coin: Lastlight. Are you his mouthpiece now?

Lastlight: no! i have integrity. he's a friend of mine

Coin: I have a problem with BND.

Lastlight: ... you put a period on that and now i'm scared

Coin: Then go cry to your mom.

Lastlight: are you really the wizard

Coin: The cheapest wizard on the board. Genuine article.

Lastlight: does it come with a warranty

Coin: Wizards aren't worth anything if they're everywhere. And when I find out who started that name, I'm going to make it their problem.

Lastlight: the challenge. do me a solid. pull it. i have a section to fill and three hundred posts on it since you posted

Coin: Fine. Done.

Lastlight: thanks :)

Coin: Sure.

He had picked the handle as a joke about his own last name. Banks was where the money was supposed to be, and he had never had any, so he had named himself after the loose change instead.

The Wizard was the other name, the one the board had given him, and nobody knew where that one had started — not the people who used it, not him. He hated it. He had gone out of his way to make sure everybody knew he hated it, which had turned out to be the mistake, because now it had stuck.

On Unsafe he was somebody. Off the board he was twenty-five years old with nine hundred dollars to his name, and at 8:44 that evening he was sitting in a one-bedroom in Northern Virginia with a bowl of noodles going soft at his elbow.

The day had gone like this.

He went to bed at 4:20 and got up at 6:30. Two hours. He stood in the shower until the water ran cold, finished the paper in one sitting, printed it in the department basement, walked it across campus, and left it in the tray outside Vance's door with his name — Adrian Banks — on the top sheet.

He was back at his apartment by noon. He lay down on the couch in his clothes and did not open his eyes again until 8:07 p.m., when his phone lit up the ceiling.

There was nothing in the refrigerator but ramen, which was not nothing. He put the kettle on and ate standing at the counter, because sitting down felt like agreeing to something. Then he carried the bowl to the desk. The computer was the only thing in the apartment that had ever cost real money, and the only thing in it that worked.

Unsafe was open in the second window, the way it was always open.

Two things had happened on the board while he slept. Somebody had posted a screenshot and a line out of a log and an argument about whether BND's perimeter was showing damage from the night before, and by dinnertime that thread was eleven pages long. And Creeper — old enough that people assumed he had a reason for everything, good enough that they read him anyway — had walked into the middle of it and said, in the long amused way he had, that BND was one of the last honest intelligence services on earth, and that the children in that thread ought to take their theories somewhere they would be appreciated.

He read it twice, then set the fork down.

He had never been the harmless kind on that board. Not swinging often was a choice he made, not a taste he lacked.

What kept coming back to him was the man who had sat eleven feet behind him until a quarter to three that morning. Not the trick — the forged certificate, the script, the one second — but the fact of him. He did not know who Wade was. He knew the sound of a man not saying anything, and he knew that when Wade decided a thing was worth doing he did it out in the open, on somebody else's network, with a steady hand and no explanation owed to anybody.

Somewhere in the last day he had started, without noticing, to use the man as a unit of measure. The measurement came out the same every time. Wade did things. Coin checked things twice, and was good at this in a way that looked, from the outside, exactly like being nervous.

So what he wanted, sitting in front of a thread where a man had put his hand up for an intelligence agency, was to be the kind of person who did not check twice.

He opened a new thread and put Creeper's handle in the title. On Unsafe, a name in a title was how you called a man out. He wrote it in one pass, posted it, and did not read it back.

For a minute afterward he sat there without touching anything. The thread was moving. He understood then what he had not understood an hour before: reckless and decisive are not the same thing.

With nothing open, he moved the mouse in circles for a while and looked at the window. The light out there did what it did in that part of Virginia all night — the sky white from the bottom up, no way to tell whether anything had ever been switched off. He got up and pulled the shade down, and the room went dark except for the two monitors.

He read the board until eleven.

CapCon had taken over the front page the way it did every summer: organizer threads, speaker lists, arguments about the badge art, a hotel block that had sold out in an afternoon, and the yearly fight about who was going this time. He read it the way he read anything he was behind on — title, claim, code, argument — until the techniques of the month were in his head, sorted, ready.

The two boards he had grown up on were still online, still busy, and no longer any use to anybody. Redline had turned into a mall: vendor threads, press releases, a help section where kids asked for scripts they could not read and got them. It was where the script kiddies came from. Blackglass was worse. It still had people on it who knew things, and they had stopped talking in public, and what was left in the open was a brawl with no technique in it.

Unsafe was the exception, and had been the exception long enough that it was the only place he knew where an argument about a technique could still be won by being right. He had learned most of what he knew from threads there that ran to forty pages and ended with two people agreeing, which did not happen anywhere else on the internet. The zine that ran alongside the board had two editors and no money and a fight going in the letters column about whether they should take a table at CapCon or stay invisible, and he had read both sides of it and never said anything.

CapCon itself had never been a real possibility, which was what made the thing in his desk drawer strange. His generation had never been up on that stage — he could not name one person his own age who had stood in a room like that and talked — and the invitation had been in the drawer since June, looking official, with terms in it. He had not written back. Every time he read it, something in the package was slightly off, and he could not have explained what without sounding like a man making excuses, so he had left it where it was and tried not to think about it.

He thought about the whole week for a while, which was the mistake, because it brought him around to the man at the other desk and the agency in that man's mouth. BND.

He had put a door in their fence the night before — a maintenance login nobody looked at, thin permissions, nothing on the other side of it watching. And then tonight he had gone and started a fight over a man who had said one nice thing about them. It had occurred to him at least six times since breakfast that he had never gone back to see whether the door was still there.

There was no reason it would not be. That was the whole point of leaving one.

He still wanted to see it.

He got up and checked the deadbolt, out of habit, and then sat back down and moved the cursor into the terminal window. His fingers went onto the keys.

Then he took them off again and sat back and looked at the screen one more time, the way he looked at everything before he went into it.

Then he leaned forward and went to see whether his door was still open.