Magic gone digital.

AKA Bitheads, Hackers

Nothing in the past decade has revolutionized the Underground like the internet. E-mail, Google, Wikipedia–dukes everywhere have found ways to put these to good use. Most of Mak Attax’s communications are done by e-mail, Dirk Allen runs a wiki for dukes, and rumor has it that there are a couple of obscene pictures of the Freak circulating on 4chan. But for most adepts, it’s just a tool–no different than their cars, their telephones. But for Cybermancers, the internet is their mother, their teacher, their lover, their fetish. The glow of computer monitors is their sacred fire, the ocean of 0’s and 1’s the world they live in. It’s an easy school to be drawn into–anyone who’s spent days on the internet, reading or gaming or wanking, has felt its silicon siren call. And becoming a Cybermancer is no harder than clicking the right links…

The central paradox of Cybermancy is that the internet is far more real to hackers than the real world–and yet, it’s nothing more than a giant illusion. They immerse themselves in a world made of strings of numbers, both completely abstract and completely solid. When they yield to the illusion and grasp the reality of the internet, then they have found true power.

Cybermancy Blast Style
The Cybermantic blast is a blast of electricity. Every electric device, power line, or similar near the target starts shooting out sparks that find their way to the target, giving him a nasty shock. The blast does not work if there are no sources of electricity–power lines, batteries, electric devices, anything like that–near the blast’s target.

Stats

Generate a Minor Charge: Spend eight hours browsing the internet, taking breaks only to eat and piss. Get 500 hits to a web site you’ve created in a single day.

Generate a Significant Charge: Spend a solid week browsing the internet, taking breaks only for food, bathroom, and sleep. Get 10,000 hits to a web site you’ve created in a single day. Create a programming language or a program that is used worldwide.

Generate a Major Charge: Spend a whole year on the internet. Get over a million hits to a site in a single day.

Taboo: Not getting online. If you spend a day without browsing the internet for at least an hour, you lose all charges you’re carrying.

Random Magic Domain: Messing with electronics. A Cybermancer can mess with virtually any form of electronic device, as long as it has some kind of chip or circuitry in it. Opening electronic locks, turning devices on or off, and similar can all be achieved with random magic.

Starting Charges: Newly created Cybermancers start with four charges.

Charging Tips: As long as you’ve got a computer with an internet connection, you’re set. You can easily pull in five to seven minor charges a week just from browsing, or a significant charge if you’re willing to devote a week to it. If you’re lucky enough to make a web site that gets very popular very quickly–the next Amazon, Google, or Wikipedia–odds are you’ll start pulling any a fair crop of minor and significant charges each week.

Cybermancy Minor Formula Spells

Anonymizer
Cost: 2 minor charges
Effect: This spell creates the ultimate proxy. As long as you’re browsing under the protection of this spell, no one can find out anything about you over the web–your i.p. address and similar information are completely hidden. This spell lasts for a day.

Brute Force
Cost: 2 minor charges
Effect: This spell tricks a digital device or website into accepting any password you give it–for one time only. You can sign on to someone else’s e-mail account, open a password-controlled lock, or similar.

Fatal Error
Cost: 4 minor charges
Effect: This spell can knock someone out for a good long while. When you cast this spell, you target any one person you can see. He immediately falls to the floor unconscious If he takes damage while unconscious he immediately wakes up, and a bucket of water to the face can do the trick as well. Otherwise, he remains knocked out for around ten minutes to an hour.

Information Superhighway
Cost: 4 minor charges
Effect: This spell grants the computer touched a T-1 quality wireless internet connection. The connection is purely magical–routers, phone cords, and such are completely unnecessary, and you can get a perfect connection in the middle of nowhere. The connection lasts for eight hours.

Instant Messenger
Cost: 1 minor charge
Effect: This spell lets you compose a brief message of around twenty-five words, and then send it to the e-mail account or text message it to the cell phone of any person you know. All you need to know is the name of your subject.

Read Data
Cost: 1 minor charge
Effect: You can read any digital data-storage medium–CD’s, floppy discs, flash drives–just by staring at it (no, you cannot read an entire hard drive with this spell). You can read text files as if they were written material, listen to any music files, watch any video files, and so on.

Snow Crash
Cost: 3 minor charges
Effect: By touching any digital device, you can infect it with a plethora of malignant little viruses that cause it to crash. The device remains useless for a day, after which it resumes normal functioning. No mere anti-virus software is enough to protect against this spell, although the Labyrinth program can (see below).

Sparks Fly
Cost: 1 charge
Effect: Sparks Fly is the Cybermancy minor blast.

Stumble Upon
Cost: 2 charges
Effect: A nifty little divination, all this spell takes is typing a question into your browser’s address bar, and hitting enter. You are immediately taken to the single website that will best answer your question. You are not necessarily guaranteed a good answer, especially in matters related to the Underground. It may be that the information you seek just isn’t on the internet–but that isn’t very likely. It’s more likely the website you pull up just doesn’t contain very much information–or that what good information it has is outweighed by a heap of bull.

Technopathy
Cost: 1 minor charge
Effect: This spell lets you interact with digital devices without need for input or output devices. You can type without a keyboard, move a cursor without a mouse, listen to an iPod without headphones–you can even view a screen straight on your eyes, with no need for a monitor. This spell only lasts for about half an hour.

Who Is
Cost: 2 minor charges
Effect: This spell lets you identify someone based on their i.p. address. To cast this spell, all you need is the i.p. address of the subject. By meditating on it, you learn the name of the last person to browse under that address, get a mental image of them, and learn if they are an adept, and avatar, or just a mundane.

Cybermancy Significant Formula Spells

Anonymous Does Not Forgive
Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: This spell prevents anyone from finding out any personal information about you. People who already know things about you don’t forget it, and people can still learn stuff about you by personally observing you. However, they can’t find stuff about you in any other way–web pages with personal information on you are unavailable, your yearbook picture is mysteriously blurred, and the page in the phone book with your number was carelessly ripped out. This spell lasts for a day.

Banned
Cost: 3 significant charges
Effect: This spell kicks someone off the internet. When you cast this spell, choose any person you can see. For a week, any time they try to get on the internet, their attempt mysteriously fails. Their computer may crash before the browser loads, their ISP may yank service for no reason–but no matter what, they just cannot access the internet. Other Cybermancers are immune to the effects of this spell.

Dance the Electric Fandango
Cost: 3 significant charges
Effect: This spell lets you travel through the internet. To cast this spell, you must simply touch a computer connected to the internet, and concentrate on where you want to go. You seem to vanish into the computer touched, and begin traveling to the designated location. You come out of the nearest internet-linked computer to the location you designated.

Everything Breaks
Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: The big brother of Snow Crash, this spell permanently breaks any electrical device you can touch. The device cannot be repaired by any means short of magic.

Geek Squad
Cost: 2 significant charges
Effect: This spell restores a broken electrical device to perfect condition. Physical damages, computer viruses, even magical debilitations are all removed by this spell.

Identity Theft
Cost: 2 significant charges
Effect: A souped-up cousin of Stumble Upon, this spell lets you find out everything the internet has on a person. Using it is easy–type the name of the subject into a search bar, and hit enter. You are brought to a search page, which has a link to every site on the internet containing information relating to that person. Only information about the specific person you have in mind is brought up, not just anyone who shares their name.

Mindhack
Cost: 6 significant charges
Effect: This spell literally formats the brain of anyone you can see. They’re left brain-dead and catatonic. Without immediate medical attention, they will probably die of dehydration within a few days. Assuming they are put under medical care and hooked up to a feeding machine, that come out of their coma within a few months. Their minds are restored once they recover, but they may suffer from amnesia for a few days or weeks.

Power Surge
Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: Power Surge is the Cybermancy significant charge.

Rule 34
Cost: 2 significant charges
Effect: This spell lets you spread misinformation about a person all across the internet. The most common form of misinformation is pornography that seems to feature the subject of the spell–hence, its name. However, scandalous news reports or other forms of embarrassing pictures are just as possible.

Cybermancy Major Effects

Create an artificial intelligence. Upload terabytes of information from the internet onto your brain. Create a virus that wipes out tens of thousands of computers permanently.

Cybermantic Programs

Magic isn’t all that Cybermancers do. Most are skilled hackers or programmers, and they’ve managed to come up with a fair share of mundane programs and appliances that have since spread throughout the Underground. The programs are fairly common, and any one who’s clued in probably knows at least one place where they can buy them.

Firefox Omega
Firefox Omega is a pretentiously named bundle of extensions for the Firefox browser, said to have been designed by a Cybermancer working on the Mozilla devlopment team. It contains a number of useful tools for dukes–a filter that picks up references to the Underground in otherwise normal web sites, a search toolbar that only picks up sites related to the occult, and similar. It also never crashes.

Labyrinth
Labyrinth is the anti-virus program for anyone in the Underground. It can take out just about any virus, and it’s self-improving–with every virus it takes out, it gets better. It can even protect against magical viruses, such as those created by the Snow Crash spell.

Logos
Logos is a basic word-processor designed for those who need to regularly type in the Gnostic alphabet, Norse runes, alchemical symbols, hieroglyphics, or cuneiform. Anyone that wants to type up a spellbook is probably going to be using it.

Principia
Principia is a simple calculator program made for dukes who need to do odd mathematical calculations. Bibliomancers looking to find how many charges they can get from buying certain books, Narco-Alchemists who need to know the specific gravity of crack, Dipsomancers who want to figure out how much alcohol their liver can take before it gives–they can all find a use for Principia.