There is a point in a man's life when he decides 'I will settle for this'. He slumps into the cheerful mediocrity of North America: chooses a prefabricated home in a prefabricated neighborhood, settles down with his prefab wife to raise prefab kids. He picks his lifestyle out of a catalogue, and his family runs like a sitcom. If you can't quite figure out how to fit in, there are books on the subject -- a specialist can run you through how to live your perfect substandard life: safe, secure, shackled and serene.

Follow these easy steps, and nothing can go wrong. No surprises lurk around a corner to upset your carefully orchestrated twenty-year plan.

Hiro was born to Jason and Saori Stice in a suburb of Portland, Oregon. His father was an electrical engineer employed by Pacific Bell, and his mother... Housekeeper, den mother, pill popper, itinerant unfaithful wife. Hiro's earliest memory of childhood was through his playpen's bars: watching his mother -- face streaked with tears -- scrub the couch with a neon green sponge and a bottle of fabric cleaner. He does not remember her face buried in the plumber's lap half an hour earlier, nor the half-empty bottle of valium on the coffee table. He does remember the paramedics who took her to the hospital. "Mommy is sick," his father told him. "She'll be at the hospital for a few days."

Hiro was a bright child. "My little prodigy," his dead-eyed mother would call him. His father -- as he sunk deeper into his own particular bedlam -- did not refer to him at all. He excelled at school, and began his senior year at age sixteen. Mathematics, the sciences, computers: an archetypal geek, the kind of kid who was supposed to become a talented code-pusher; a college professor; the next Bill Gates.

And he might have, had only one factor had interfered with his life.

Xi Xiung. I was in the computer lab, in the school's basement. He sat down beside me and asked what I was doing. I thought I was in deep shit-- 'd been fucking around with the local network. He told me it's real Name -- it was in hex, and he chanted the alphanumerics like a monk. He showed me you could learn a machine's secrets by knowing it's name -- knowing what it meant, you could learn how it worked.

But it was Jake -- I never got his last name -- that showed me there was more. It wasn't just the machines that had names: everything did. He dosed me with enough acid to make Kesey shit his pants, then showed me the sacred geometry in the Mercedes-benz logo. And I spoke to it, then -- Jake sat back, grinning, while I made a deal. When I woke up the next day, I found a corporate triskele on the inside of my left wrist, and on the news they were saying the traffic was jammed up all over P-town: every Benz in the city, engines just fucking detonating on the highway... the meat wagons were carrying people off four at a time. I was hung-over; needed the weekend to finish my project. My physics teacher -- he drove an old benz...

It went on like this for six months. Xi would show him the secrets inside the machines, and Jake would show him those same secrets applied everywhere else -- and gave him the chemicals to see them. Xi told him the Names, and Jake showed him the symbols; Xi told him there was power in those secrets, and Jake showed him there was always a price. Jake's only stipulation was that Xi never know about him -- that Hiro would never reveal his identity, or the 'extra' tricks he'd been taught.

One lazy monday afternoon, Xi pushed Hiro over the edge.

The shit Jake gave me -- he stopped me on my way to Xi's house: said the telephone told him what was going on -- was screaming somewhere in my prefrontals. I could feel something creeping up out of my hindbrain as Xi fitted the goggles over my eyes. My brain felt like a fucking nuclear reactor. Xi said I passed in record time -- Linus (that's what I named the little fucker) told me the next day that whatever Jake had fed me 'woke him up' -- that Xi's test was just a little push. That without whatever was riding the express train to hell on my dendrites, it would've taken years. That I wasn't meant to wake up yet. He reminds me of this constantly. He's a perfect cube, Linus. Follows me around day in and day out -- I can't get rid of him. What's worse, every now and then he reproduces. There's six pigs, now. And the latest one -- Burroughs -- bites.

But he did. Wake up. 

Jake dissapeared five months later, and shortly thereafter Hiro dropped out of the cut-rate community college he was attending. Accompanying Xi, he moved to San Francisco, in order to continue his studies with House Thig there. The thigites were not impressed when the more eccentric aspects of his belief became manifest. Tension was in the air.

Those assholes had no vision. They thought these were just new tools to harness old powers. It never occurred to them that this is a new age, and new angels were waking up, even as theirs fell asleep. Gabriel passed his zenith, and there's nowhere to go but down... but Boeing is a rising star. I met a kid named JT at a party out in Oakland: he understood. So did Ms. Inscrutable. What the hell did I need these old fucks for? Linus agreed, and I told Xi to stick it up his ass. That's around when me'n JT moved to Berkeley. People just started showing up. The others who understood the new gods. None of us knew exactly what it meant, but we knew it meant something; that we were onto a secret nobody else cared about. 

Paradigm

The Hermetic school of thought Hiro was indoctrinated into centers around manipulation through naming. A thing may be invoked by its name; changed by modifying its name, examined through the scrutiny of its name. Xi Xiung focused on the names of machines, and the names of data-aggregates. The names of the old angels -- the names by which the primal forces were invoked -- were also part of Hiro's training, but Xi thought of them as secondary in importance. It was systems that fascinated Xi, and -- whenever Hiro wasn't reciting the usual lists of greater and lesser angels and their Enochian names -- it was systems that his student would study with him. A Name had three parts, according to Xi: number, sign, and word. The number was a formula that expressed either the sign or the word -- the latter were shortcuts; representations of the number.

Jake laughed at Hiro when he tried to explain the system. When Hiro tried to show him the elegant geometry of Gabriel's true name, he laughed harder, and passed over a joint. "Gabriel is an old, dying thing," he was told. Jake uncapped a sharpie, and with meticulous, precise strokes, scrawled the Boeing logo on the wall. Vision shattered into fractals from the DMT laced through the marijuana cigarette, he saw the familiar glow of the dominion of phlogiston -- elemental fire -- in the lines. "There are new angels, Hiro. New gods."

"There are two sets of names -- the old names, the names the fogies know, the primordial names -- and there are the names that change with mankind's belief. There are the angels that have sat in their thrones for millenia, unchanging and terrible; there are the angels that are born with every fresh idea, every new public icon. These are the angels fueled by humanity. These are the gods that are born when a salary man stops praying to God and starts praying to Sony... and gets promoted." 

'Nature is relationships in space. Geometry defines relationships in space. Art creates relationships in space.' -- M. Boles and R. Newman, Universal Patterns, 1990

"Each iteration of these symbols are linked to one another: a network of belief that connects every golden arch to its cousins the world over. McDonalds -- if you could grok the sigil that every Micky D's on earth sketches out in aggregate..."

Jake taught him the names of the new angels, their dominions, and how to invoke them. He told Hiro it was the symbols that mattered -- not the tools used to manipulate them. Using a Macintosh to invoke Mercedes was worshipping Mac, not Benz. Corporate logos he compared to enochian runes: he charted the overlapping geometry in their design, the chains of correlating formulae that dictated their shape. 

Xi handed down rules. He taught discipline; rigid systems, codes that were not to be violated. Jake taught him that those systems were, in fact, power-structures in and of themselves: iron prisons for awareness, echoes of the chains that kept humankind thinking in straight lines. Symbols and rituals had power, but more power still was in the perversion of those symbols; creating paradoxes which made the system break down. Jake fed a vending machine five dollars in bathroom tokens and picked a bag of olean-drenched potato chips: across the station platform, a screaming man stumbled out of the men's bathroom; soaked in human feces. When you violate the rules, he told Hiro, ripping open the bag, everything goes to shit. The chemical yellow dust drifted across the floor like snow. 

"Then he laid on the mindfuck. I remember chaos theory from when I got interested in fractals -- but it was Jake that showed me that chaos was a system in and of itself. Chaos is viral: self-perpetuating and infinite. A butterfly flaps it's wings in china, and someone spontaneously combusts in Idaho. When you tweak a chain of causality, you inject a bit of viral chaos into the system. The results are predictable; the side-effects are impossible to determine. Anything can go wrong at any time -- whenever you tweak the system, manipulate the order, you're gambling. And every now and then, that chain of causality whips around to bite you in the ass."

Where Xi and Jake diverged the most, however, was on the subject of the human mind itself. Xi regarded it as an impossibly complex organism to be dealt with carefully. Jake was far more pragmatic.

"It's a machine, sure -- but it's more like a network than he ever understood. The neural pathways inside -- you could spend a lifetime trying to chart it out. People do. But the important part is that there are doors: on-ramps where you can shunt in whatever you want. Lysergic acid, prozac, MDMA or tegratol -- they all work to open and close doors, to allow different parts of the mind access to an influx of information. How do you inject that data? Each sense is a different input device. And man understands, intuitively, the symbols of his modern gods."

Attributes

Abilities

...signature rotes:

The Long Arm of Murphy's Law (Entropy 1)

Collecting a detailed set of information on his target -- be it institution, individual, or social phenomenon -- the mage converts a selection of key pieces of data and extracts their numerological values. These numbers are then employed as a 'key' to decipher the whole body of information. Employing this key, the mage extracts a short phrase from the bulk of data, indicating what action he may take to bring Murphy's law to bear on his target. 

System: This effect is a passive perception effect, revealing a single action the caster may take to set off a chain of events detrimental to his target. The interpretation reveals a simple action (release a rat at the corner of Cole and Haight; give two cigarettes to the next person who asks for one, steal a piece of mail from the nearest mailbox) that the caster may take in order to set off a chain of events which do his target harm.

Mechanics: Intelligence+research, difficulty 6. Each success over 1 reduces the difficulty of the following roll: perception+mathematics, difficulty (10-(intelligence+research successes)). The number of successes on the second roll determines how effective and expedient the action in question will be.

Better-adjusted Than Thou (Entropy 1|Mind 1)

Prozac, an SSRI manufactured by Eli Lilly pharmaceuticals, is the arhcetypal 'emotional wellness' drug. More people in the united states are on Prozac than any other psychiatric drug. By popping a 20mg prozac and thanking Lilly for Her influence, the caster puts himself in a state of perfect emotional wellness. Any extremes of emotion become impossible, affect is muted, and others' flaws become painfully obvious.

System: This operates as a Mind shield, blocking out any attempts to influence the caster's mind. It does not block mind-reading, but only effects which manipulate the mental state. In addition, the caster becomes aware of the psychiatric flaws -- derangements, phobias, etc -- of anyone around him. He does not empathize with the flawed, but rather regards their disability from a comfortable distance. This perception does not work on anyone under the influence of prozac.

(Note: prozac does not interact well with other drugs. While invoking Lilly's favored child, the caster is not in tune with his 'day', and interactions with other drugs may well be fatal.)