PROGRAMAGIC, Book 1.01

Behind The Fire Wall

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If you are reading this it means one of two things – I am either dead or behind bars.

If it’s the former then this testimony should bring those guilty of my death and the hacking of the Fire Wall to justice.

If it’s the latter then I hope this testimony will help prove my innocence and extricate me from the predicament I currently find myself in before it’s too late.

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This whole sorry chain of events was set in motion when I arrived at work this morning to find myself under arrest and escorted by security to my superior's office. There I was accused of gross incompetence, criminal negligence and suspected criminal intent, which had resulted in a successful break-in into the Fire Wall – this is a charge I'll never accept.

You have to understand, I'm one of the best specialists in my field and very proud of it. But this isn't just a question of my professional reputation although there are very few people alive who know as much about data protection systems as me. Nor is it just a question of me needing to prove my innocence.

It's just that I, and I alone, have been managing the Fire Wall project in its entirety from its conception to the present day. It was me who wrote every single piece of related code and programmed all the security algorithms. The Fire Wall is my baby and ultimately my masterpiece. I know its functionality inside and out. There’s no way anyone could break into it and there's no one on this earth who's going to convince or persuade me otherwise. It is totally unhackable and that's all there is to it.

Nevertheless, there’s no getting away from the fact that someone has broken into it. There has been a break-in and something extremely important, a key to be precise, has been purloined as a result. Its disappearance poses a serious threat to our national security.

The fact that it had happened and my inability to accept it, knocked me off my stride and when I was called in I didn't even argue or fight back. I was immediately barred from work until the completion of the investigation. My security clearance and system access have been denied and I have been put under house arrest with a 24-hour armed guard patrolling the perimeter of my house.

House arrest! Me! One of the highest-ranking mages in the country. Have they gone completely mad!? How dare they?

I’m not some programmer monkey working for peanuts in a semi-legal immigrant sweatshop, developing magical software for cheap and tacky wands. Although I have to admit, I used to do plenty of jobs like this when I first embarked on my illustrious career.

My family had just moved to the Murican Empire from Hindaha and my father was teaching magical calculus at the Imperial University in Apple-City during the day while moonlighting as a public flying coach driver in the evenings.

And on top of all that, he somehow managed to find the time to teach me everything he knew about magic, spells and energy flow while awakening every curious instinct in my empty young head that would later give me the drive to become a great mage.

I am none other than Sajar Randhar who was behind the development of driverless flying chariots and inter-city ships, thus freeing all flights of human error.

I was the inventor of the technology that would allow everyone to store their data in a cloud, relieving them of the need to shut up their most valuable possessions behind the physical walls of a safe or vaulted crypt.

And it was I who developed the Great Southern Wall's magic protection system when Norton the Orange – the mad dictator who ruled over us back in those dark days – decided to “protect” the Empire from immigrants crossing the Empire's southern borders. For the record, being an immigrant myself, I have made my personal position clear in no uncertain terms. But, as a government employee, I was bound hand and foot by my contractual obligations to act against my better principles.

I was the brains behind the spaceship control firmware back when Meelon Usk decided to challenge the final frontiers of physics by bursting beyond the planet’s atmosphere and into the merciless black void of space.

However, thanks be to the gods, I had nothing to do with the Book of Faces, for which I take even more pride and credit. I have absolutely no truck with social magi-tainment with its institutional cretinism, cheap tricks and endless advertising. I am a specialist in magic security. A specialist of the highest order, in fact. I might well be the best out there, but my innate modesty prohibits me from making such a claim.

Suspend me from work? Well, all right. I might have deserved it, given that my Fire Wall has been breached, its top-grade security notwithstanding. Investigate me? Fair enough. I might have done exactly the same in their shoes, although it would have been more logical to invite me to lead it. Pull my security clearance? By all means. Although it makes little sense. After all, it was I who coded the entire security system in the first place.

But accusing me of incompetence and negligence – well, that's where I have to draw the line..!

You can lock me up in my own home. I could think of a lot worse places to be – I have a magic bunker that is so well protected that I could easily survive a Third Magic War. You can guard its perimeter 24/7 and shut down all communication channels with the outside world – at least the ones that you've managed to detect, anyway.

But no one will ever be able to stop me from running my own investigation. After all, if someone has indeed managed to hack my impenetrable Fire Wall, then it's up to me to find out who’s done it and how.

Without my magical guidance, the investigators won’t even be able to find their way to the john. Unless, of course, this whole series of events is a set-up aimed at framing me personally, in which case getting to the bottom of this is going to be a matter of personal survival.

Especially given that I already have a prime suspect – in fact my only suspect. The only person with the technical expertise to have committed this crime. Namely, me.

The only problem with this watertight hypothesis is – I didn’t do it. The only alternatives are that either I have somehow convinced myself that I didn’t do it or that I did indeed do it but don’t remember doing so.

Seeing as I’m absolutely certain that I have had nothing to do with the break-in, I’m not going to get very far interrogating myself. Still, there remains the possibility that I might have been hypnotized or forced into doing it – a particularly powerful spell might have done the trick. They might well have erased or replaced my memory. They may have done all sorts of unnatural and abominable things that I might not be able to remember.

Which is why I need to check all the records and pinpoint my whereabouts at the time of the crime last night. And when I say all the records, I mean those I couldn't have erased or altered myself.

You might think I’m being paranoid but in the century and a half I’ve been practicing High Magic I’ve seen more than my fair share of the world's dark underbelly and have the enhanced security measures to match whatever it might throw at me. Especially, considering the importance of some of the projects I’m currently working on, not to mention the prototype spells and priceless artefacts that are stored here.

“OK, Spirit! You can show yourself!”

Instantly, a small cloud appeared, manifesting itself into the shape of a young and rather alluring elfin maiden clad in nothing but a short silk bathrobe, her fair hair twisted into two braids. Her appearance had evidently been calculated to do me a permanent mischief.

“Hi, darling. You're home early, I’ve barely had time to start missing you.”

“Tell me something, I don't know,” I replied gruffly as she flashed a smug smile, satisfied that her appearance and the irony of her remark had hit home.

“Why don't we watch the match together? I have more than an inkling that the Grimvault Dwarves will make short work of the Red Unicorns…”

“Sorry, Spirit, there’s no time for the game today. It looks like we’ve got a problem.”

“Yes, I know! We're out of milk, but don’t worry I've already got it covered. The order will be coming first thing tomorrow morning, fresh from the pail.” She surveyed me with a playful sparkle in her emerald-green eyes, her enormous eyelashes fluttering provocatively with every blink.

“Nope, Spirit. We have an even bigger problem.” And I proceeded to tell her the events of the day. Or at least what I had managed to glean from Full Metal Pat, my immediate superior at the Pentagonal Citadel. I explained to her what we were facing and what sort of help I’d be needing from her.

And, yes, you're absolutely right in surmising that there’s a lot more to Spirit than your average voice-activated domestic assistant. She is infinitely more complex than those interface spells that have become so popular recently and gradually begun to replace regular magic wands.

These days, instead of a wave a wand all you have to say is, “Let there be light,” and the interface spell running your house or flying chariot will carry out your every command. They can cook you dinner using standard or customized recipes, order the shopping, clean the house, turn on the music or even transmit a live or recorded image on your crystal ball. And these are just their basic functions, these voice-activated assistants have become the perfect replacement for the old wooden magic wands that our forebears used to use.

Spirit, however, is a different kettle of fish. As far as I’m aware, she is the world’s first artificial daemon.

She has been ten hard years in the making, but I finally succeeded where the planet's finest magic minds had failed.

Recently, I have managed to make an important breakthrough. I've been testing my creation, analyzing her behavior as critically as I can, looking for flaws and vulnerabilities and editing and adding to her spell code. However, I wasn't sure she was ready to face the world. Or, perhaps, to be more precise, I wasn't sure whether the world was ready to face her.

That's why I have kept Spirit at home in my local cloud. I didn't assign her an anthropomorphous shape – but granted her the free will to take on any shape she chooses, a gift she regularly uses to wind me up.

Spirit isn’t exactly the best name I could have come up with. For old-fashioned superstitious reasons, I was reluctant to give her a name and get too emotionally attached until I was sure I’d succeeded. So, I would just refer to her as a spirit. As in, “Hey, spirit! What's 45,876,476 multiplied by the square root of 958,603,809,348?” Or, “spirit, count the odd numbers from zero to 100,000, omitting those divisible by seven, then count the even numbers in reverse, omitting those divisible by six.”

Once I realized what a resounding success she was, I decided to give her a name. However, by that point, we had both got used to me calling her Spirit, so Spirit she remained.

Most mages’ attempts to create an artificial spirit have hit the rocks because of their stubborn perfectionism. However, in order to create something that begins to approach human consciousness and ultimately transcends it, it needs to be imperfect. So, I have ended up creating something that is sometimes perversely imperfect.

Her quick temper and highly refined sense of humor are occasionally enough to drive me berserk. She is constantly testing me out with her pedantry and caprices, and I regularly lose our jousts of wit and repartee. Time and time again I ask myself what possessed me to make her quite that imperfect.

Most developers would have tried to create an artificial spirit that would conform to the rules of any standard object-oriented magic by logically linking spells to physical objects. More often than not, something like a skull, a crystal ball or a book, and so on.

But I had always thought this was a bit of a dead-end and immediately turned to fundamental magic in my quest for completely new solutions and approaches. I've managed to create all the high-complexity neuron paths necessary for a self-learning system and maintain the stability of its consciousness at the expense of the instability of its form. After all, equilibrium is the quality that keeps the world on the straight and narrow.

However, with her capricious character, I wasn't totally sure that I’d be able to preserve mine.

“All right, old-timer. Quit crying into your beard and let's get down to business.” As Spirit’s tone became more imposing so did her appearance, her hair now in a no-nonsense ponytail, her thick-framed schoolmarm's glasses sitting interrogatively on the end of her nose and her arms akimbo. “I have already monitored all the crystal ball recordings and you do have an alibi.”

“Well, that's a start. So, it wasn't me, was it?”

“It’s still a great mystery to me how someone quite as obtuse as you could have created someone with my exceptional intellectual faculties. Didn't I just tell you that you have an alibi? Do you humans have to have everything spelled out for you? Or is it just you who is so exceptionally cognitively challenged?”

“Oh, you’d be surprised, darling. There’s one born every minute,” I smiled, happy to have managed to get one over her for once.

“You came back last night at precisely 21:43 and stayed home all night without communicating with anyone. There hasn't been a break-in. No one's tried to coerce or manipulate you into doing anything you didn’t want to and you didn't do anything remotely interesting, let alone suspicious. At 22:04 precisely, you produced a remarkably successful bowel movement…”

“Whoa, Spirit, too much information, stop right there! You don't need to divulge all our family secrets.” I protested, somewhat put out. “Our investigation is being recorded, after all. So, delete that last phrase, please.”