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Curled up in bed, Trixie Lulamoon stared at her laptop monitor with a growing rage. That was at least the fifth such error today! “Discord!” she screamed.
Discord’s humorous voice echoed down what passed for Trixie’s hallway, meaning he was still in the living room using her only good chair. Well, her only chair. “Yes, my duckling?” he asked, sounding far too innocent.
“Are you using all my internet connection again?! I’m trying to read my celebrity gossip sites.”
“Of course! I can’t let any of those ones and zeroes go to waste while I’m livestreaming, you know.”
An already all-too-familiar feeling settled upon Trixie. She didn’t know what Discord was talking about. She felt a strong temptation to ask. And she knew that she’d regret doing so. But maybe if she asked him nicely he’d let her use some of the internet again? She was paying all the bills, after all, and so far his promise to teach her magic hadn’t come to much more than telling her to feel angry and see what happened. On the bright side, her neighbor’s radio wasn’t playing holiday music 24/7 anymore…
Slowly, reluctantly, Trixie got out of bed and marched into the living room. Discord had magicked himself up a computer a few days ago, a massive thing that ran circles—sometimes literally—around Trixie’s old laptop. Currently it was floating a few inches above Discord’s head, a screen-mounted camera fixed on him as he lounged in her chair wearing a gingham dress and curlers. There were certain curves under the dress that definitely did not belong on an old man, and Trixie could feel the regret building even before she started asking any questions.
But, “What are you doing.”
“Livestreaming, poppet, I told you already! Isn’t this age marvelous? I just point my computer at me, and anyone in the world can watch what I’m doing!”
“But you aren’t doing anything.”
“I know, I know, isn’t that the beauty of it? Well, I suppose that’s not quite true. I’m also watching somebody else’s livestream, a cute little magenta-skinned girl in Manehattan.”
Trixie sighed and continued the farce. “And what’s she doing?”
Discord blinked suddenly enormous eyes at her. “I don’t think I understand the question.”
The final straw snapped inside Trixie’s brain, and she grabbed her wand from the dresser and thrust it in front of her. Discord’s computer exploded into an immense, multicolored fireball that quickly rematerialized into an old worn-out birthday balloon. Several blessed seconds passed of Discord not saying anything, which time Trixie used to stand panting from the sudden exertion. Magic was a more physical force than she’d expected, and whatever muscles she needed to blow things up, they were still developing.
“Well,” said Discord with the air of one not in the least put off by events, “your aim is improving!”
“I was aiming for your head,” she said, not really meaning it.
“Then I’m glad to report your aim is exactly as conveniently poor as ever. But tell me, Trixie, haven’t you ever thought there might be more behind your connection problems than one sorry old man, taking his first opportunity to learn about a brave new world?” The yellow t-shirt he was suddenly wearing over his dress read ‘Computers for Dummies,’ although the text was printed upside-down.
Trixie raised an eyebrow. Discord was an infuriating roommate who rarely made much sense, but she hadn’t yet known him to directly mislead her. If Discord said there was some other trouble with Trixie’s internet, then for the sake of her celebrity gossip, perhaps it was worth it to believe him. And it wouldn’t do any harm to ask him just a few more questions… probably. “What are you telling Trixie?”
“Oohoohoo! The third person again, always ever so delightful. Who is it that provides us with our access to this wonderful thing you mortals dub the internet?”
“The Los Manegeles ISP. Trixie believes it is called ConQuest.”
“Yes! And how many internets does this ConQuest promise to give you?”
“Trixie is paying for ten megabits per second.”
“And what are we getting?”
Trixie felt her face turn white as she rushed to her computer. Some sort of speed test program was already on the screen, no doubt another of Discord’s unpredictable moments of helpfulness. The number 0.4 stood out in big red letters, even as the air in the room coalesced into red mist.
“Trixie will destroy them.”
An hour later, the remaining battery charge in Trixie’s phone was just barely higher than her remaining patience. Only the full box of peanut butter crackers she had demolished in that time kept her sane, but she was beginning to suspect that ConQuest did not have a single employee, for all she’d been able to talk to was an endless stream of prerecorded menus and other messages. And they were all in the same odd chanting voice!
The first menu had asked her what language she would like the call to be in, except none of the options were ones she recognized. Suspiciously she pressed the ‘repeat all options’ button, only to be treated to an entirely different list of languages than before. She was so startled she picked the wrong one and wasted the next ten minutes trying to get the prerecorded messages to use words she could understand before she finally gave up and redialed. The experience had not gotten much better from there.
Even with the words taken care of, there was still plenty she didn’t understand, like the hold times. Trixie wasn’t even getting to talk to any real people! Why was she constantly being put on hold?! Especially since ConQuest had apparently never heard of the idea of hold music, and instead subjected her to an endless and ominous low chewing noise. On the bright side, she was getting very skilled at repeatedly inputting her account information.
By the time she reached an automated menu dedicated to the details of her account, with its seventeen distinct options, the cracker box was on fire and suggesting that her apartment did not have a sprinkler system. She pressed 4 to access advanced information about her account, only to listen to a chanting voice repeat the exact same account numbers she’d entered into the phone at least a dozen times already. Trixie’s eye twitched wildly, and the flaming cracker box sped out her open window to fall to the street below. She savored the screams.
The visceral satisfaction from the chaos outside helped Trixie realize that she was approaching the call entirely the wrong way. She wanted a better connection—ConQuest wanted her money. If she was going to get anywhere, she would need to at least pretend to give her enemy some of what it wanted, like a conscientious performer. With nothing left to lose, she pressed 4 (the list of options had changed again) to upgrade her account.
Almost instantaneously she heard the blessed sound of a real person talking to her. He was still talking in the same odd chanting cadence of the prerecorded messages, the pitch of his voice rising and falling every few seconds without any regard for what he was actually saying, but he sounded alive and Trixie was willing to take what she could get. “ConQuest account services, this is Whitewash. How can I help you?”
Trixie smiled dangerously into her phone. “Trixie has some concerns about her account’s connection speed.”
“Okay, let me have a look at that. What’s Trixie’s twenty-three-digit account number?” Trixie rattled it off in record time. “Great. It looks like we’re listed as giving ten megabits download, is that right?”
“Yes. However, Trixie is receiving less than a tenth of that.”
“That’s too bad. Unfortunately, I’m not allowed to make changes to an account without the account holder’s direct permission. Have this Trixie person call me back and I’ll see what I can do, all right?”
“But Trixie is Trixie!”
“Right, right. Okay, you have a good day, whoever you are.”
“No, you incompetent fool, I am Trixie!” Trixie shouted into the phone, but the line had already gone dead. Frantically she redialed the ConQuest phone number, only to be met with a prerecorded message informing her that automated phone service would be offline for maintenance for the next week.
Trixie’s cellphone caught on fire and was flung out the window after the empty box of crackers. There were more screams. Trixie supposed it said something about her when the only real source of pleasure in her life was other people’s suffering, but she was past caring.
Discord’s head found its way into her room, attached to an impossibly long neck. “Too bad, too bad!” he said, without so much as a hint of sympathy. “Have you considered a more direct attack?”
Another hour later, Trixie stood outside the ConQuest ComPlex in her best ‘moneyed professional’ look. A pair of sharp-cornered white spectacles clung to the tip of her nose by sheer force of will, although Trixie prided herself on her 20/20 vision so the lenses were nothing but plain glass. She wore a dark blue unbuttoned vest over her favorite white and gold-starred dress, and her magic wand was tucked threateningly into the turquoise sash around her waist. The heels on her shoes were essentially knives. She took a deep breath and walked inside.
ConQuest’s main lobby was an immense semicircle, several stories tall, with every last surface painted an offensively inoffensive beige save for the ninety-foot rendition of the company’s logo at the back of the room. Window-guarded information centers lined the walls every few feet, each one lying behind a long line of disgruntled or simply very confused petitioners. Trixie, in a moment of graciousness toward the travails of her fellow customers, chose the line with only one other person and patiently waited her turn.
Twenty minutes in, Trixie was feeling significantly less patient and could not have cared less about the effects of wireless towers on the sallow-skinned man’s begonias if she’d been paid to ignore him.
Thirty minutes in, Trixie waved her wand. The man’s shirt and glasses turned into a pudding-like substance and melted stickily off his body. He screamed and ran, and Trixie strode proudly to the front of the line.
The heavy-eyed woman at the desk had pale pink skin, with a few wavy blue curls poking out under the hood of the huge white robe that covered her whole body. She gazed at Trixie with an expression of deepest gratitude, though she made sure to keep her voice professional (if also in that same up-and-down chanting rhythm from the phone). “Did you just scare that guy away by magic?”
“Yes.”
“Oh my god thank you so much. I swear on Shell.log, if I ever so much as see a flower again in my life it will be too soon. Look, can I help you somehow?”
Trixie nodded. Her day’s interactions with ConQuest, to say nothing of Discord, had left her all but drained of hope. Trixie was Great and Powerful and could summon enough energy to try one last time, especially with a woman who felt gratitude toward her, but if this time too failed, well, she was fully prepared to bestow the full extents of her wrath on anyone who got in her way. Even if the woman’s white robe was kind of creeping her out. “Trixie has a question about her account,” she said, and recited all twenty-three digits of her number from memory.
“Awesome. Trixie Lulamoon?”
“That’s me.”
“And what’s your trouble?”
“Trixie is receiving less than one tenth of her promised download speed.”
The pink woman froze, her expression caught halfway between an apologetic smile and a look of profound fear. Out of context it was not an expression Trixie minded seeing on people, but at the moment it filled her with an exhausting, inescapable dread. “Uh…”
“Yes?”
“I… can’t do anything about that. This terminal doesn’t have the permissions.”
Trixie nodded again. No, of course it didn’t. Somehow now that it had come time for her fullest wrath, she didn’t even feel capable of mild surprise. She waved her wand and blew up the woman’s terminal, but more from necessity than from malice.
The woman, however, was coming to realize that an angry magician could not be trusted to always be on your side. She rose unsteadily to her feet, even the endless chanting gone from her voice as she looked uneasily behind her. “Uh, in that case… I can take you around back to look at your connection, if you like?”
“Very well.”
The window and the bit of beige wall under it turned out to be a sliding door, and the pink woman escorted Trixie back into the depths of the ConQuest ComPlex, through a long series of hallways whose walls were decorated with arresting and disturbing symbols from another age. The beige on the walls faded the farther they went inside, to be replaced with a color that was not quite black but seemed to flicker into any of a thousand other colors whenever it wasn’t being looked at too closely. Trixie also had the uncomfortable feeling that the halls were getting less spacious and regular, resembling more rocky tunnels than the right-angled halls she had grown to expect.
At last they stopped in what looked like nothing more than a small rocky grotto, with a deep dark crevice in the center about six feet in diameter. A single thin white cord ran through the grotto from one stone wall to the other, glimmering with constantly shifting colors and shapes that Trixie thought looked alarmingly like the fragments of websites. An inky black… something extended from the dark crevice, jointed every few inches and wrapped around the center of the white cord.
Trixie stared, bewildered. “What is all this?”
“This is your internet connection. The white thread, I mean. All the data and stuff flow along this thread into your house. There’s one for every one of our customers in this place somewhere.”
Trixie leaned in to take a closer look at the thread, and recoiled; Discord must have made himself another computer, for he was viewing some websites in her absence that she had definitely not wanted to see. She turned to the pink-skinned woman. “Trixie had heard the internet was supposed to be more complicated than this. Someone said it was not a series of tubes.”
“Well, it isn’t! It’s a web. So it’s made of threads.”
“And what is that black thing?” asked Trixie, pointing at the long series of joints sticking out of the pit.
“Oh, that’s an arm of the spider.”
“…what?”
“The giant spider, almighty Shell.log. She feeds on bandwidth from the threads of the web, that’s why everything runs so slow. We’re her worshippers.”
Trixie nodded, the last refuge for someone who can no longer afford to question what the world was telling her. “I see. Trixie thinks she is going now, and will maybe report you to the Better Business Bureau.”
The robed woman sighed. “I’m afraid we really can’t let anybody else know about the spider.”
“But you just told Trixie about her.”
“Yes. Look,” said the woman, “I really am sorry about this,” and then she pushed Trixie into the crevice.
When Trixie came to, she was lying at the bottom of what appeared to be a sacrificial pit. Human bones littered the sides, as did half-chewed résumés and several graphics design portfolios. Before her rested an enormous bulbous black mass, its only discernible features a pair of malevolent house-sized red eyes and a series of vicious fangs around a mouth gaping large enough to swallow Trixie whole. Millions of arms extended from Shell.log’s body, rising up into the ceiling to, Trixie presumed, wrap themselves around other white threads and ruin the internet experiences of nearly every other citizen in Los Manegeles. She growled and aimed her wand directly at Shell.log, but the resulting flash of pink light bounced off the great spider’s skin with no effect. Perhaps it was simply too big for her.
A now-familiar chanting sound filled Trixie’s ears, and she looked up again. A dozen or so white-robed figures stood around the edges of the pit, reading from the longest and most evil scripture she had ever heard. “The limitations of liability set forth in this Section apply to any acts, omissions, and negligence of ConQuest and its underlying third-party service providers,” they intoned, “agents, suppliers, distributors, licensors and business partners (and their respective officers, employees, agents, contractors or representatives) which, but for that provision, would give rise to a cause of action in contract, tort or under any other legal doctrine…”
Trixie whimpered and tried to shut her ears against the evil chanting as the robed figures began to speak of customer equipment and the responsibility for its damage. The room was lit by a series of burning torches attached at regular intervals to a wide bronze ring, suspended from the high ceiling by three long ropes. As Shell.log closed in on her, mouth opening still wider for the kill, Trixie weakly lifted her wand to point at the ropes suspending the torches aloft. Perhaps Trixie’s magic could not affect the spider directly, but she was sure she could cut a few ropes.
A few seconds later, as the flame from the fallen torches engulfed Shell.log’s black body and the robed figures ran shouting from the room, Trixie laughed. “Time to get net-neutered, you bastards.”
The sun was lowering in the distance when Trixie left the Conquest ComPlex once and for all, pointing her wand threateningly before her in case any of the spider’s robed worshippers wanted to make one last try. There were none more to be seen, and Trixie sighed in relief. Her glasses were gone, along with one of her spiked shoes. Her vest and dress were torn and had several patches completely burned away, and her arms and legs were bloody and torn from climbing out of the pit. Her vision still swam from when one man had hit her on the head with a routing device. But she had won. ConQuest would not be able to spin more threads of its web to obtain more customers, but without Shell.log to feed on their connections, the customers it already had would enjoy high speed internet forever after. She had saved Los Manegeles.
Unfortunately, nobody would ever believe her if she told them. Trixie cursed under her breath. What was the point of being a hero if nobody ever thanked you for it?
Then she remembered her other hand and grinned. She’d managed to steal a new cellphone from one of the hooded people. Life was looking up.