What About Your Friends?

Mama texted the children while Eddie was still washing the rooster off his hands. Jessica came from Somerville. Noah, Cory, Tony, and Jonathan came from the west. By the time they climbed the stairs to 4B, the sun was down and the ebo was done.

They gathered in a tight circle on Mama’s floor in 4B, the collective àṣẹ of the group holding back the cold psychic residue left by the GOAT. Eddie, lighter now but still haunted by the dream, sat slumped on her burgundy velvet sofa, reliving the nightmare office park.

“I was completely checked out, in the theta state,” Eddie began, his voice flat. “The place was a graveyard. An abandoned office park, full of dead animals, that stench, the blood... and this guy, the GOAT, he was there. He used a word, Sārum, and he ripped a dog apart. Then he said Gamāru and the guts splattered everywhere. But the walls, guys—they were covered in the same scribbles that were tattooed on his neck.”

Cory, whose whole magickal system relies on order, frowned. "A specific ritual word for dismemberment, followed by a word for finishing or destruction. That's classic grimoire work. But the location—why an abandoned office park? It’s not a sacred space."

Mama Sapphire, resting her hands on her Oshun shrine, nodded gravely. “It is a graveyard, baby. But not of people. It is a graveyard of commerce and worry. That office park is full of the hungry dead you smelled—the ghosts of ambition, stress, and unfulfilled contracts. The sorcerer is setting his rituals in places where the collective anxiety has been harvested. He is using the spiritual garbage dump of the modern world.”

Noah leaned forward, tapping his fingers on the floor. “The mall, too. When Eddie and Tony were there, the energy died, remember? The mall, the office park—they are huge electrical and sensory grids. The GOAT is selecting sites that radiate the opposite of life. He’s draining them. He’s found a way to use corporate decay as an energy source for his darkness.”

"But how is he getting in?" Jessica asked, looking at Seraph’s biosensor bracelet on Eddie’s wrist. "The Nine of Swords anxiety I saw in the cards is a psychological curse, but sending a dream-demon is ancient. How does he make an ancient Sumerian demon follow a target's IP address?"

Jonathan, who had been listening intently, finally spoke, his voice measured and precise. "That's where the Dark Technomancy comes in. The scribbles Eddie saw are Sumerian cuneiform. It’s one of the oldest written languages in the world. For us, language is code. For the GOAT, Cuneiform is the original low-level programming language—the purest way to write a permanent command into the universe."

Tony, the mediator, gripped his own hands. "So, he's writing a curse in cuneiform. What's the AI's role?"

"He has to have an AI servitor," Jonathan explained, tapping the air with his finger as if referencing a screen. "Somebody who talks like that doesn’t partner with a machine. He owns it. I’d bet anything he’s trained it on the 'Shadow Code'—the aggregate psychic waste of the global internet. He feeds the AI Eddie’s spiritual profile—his joy, his àṣẹ, his unique sensitivity. The AI then instantly generates the single most effective curse possible—a targeted psychological hex—and translates that digital file into a Cuneiform script. Then he uses an old Mesopotamian gate-rite—open a door, send the restless dead through it—to upload that curse into the aether, and then the dark spirits hunt Eddie using his digital wake."

Eddie stared, putting the pieces together. "He's not just using a curse. He's weaponizing the internet's anxiety against my sense of self. It's a psychic DDoS attack, encoded by AI, and delivered by the restless dead."

Mama Sapphire's eyes flashed, her anger palpable. “He is trying to colonize your consciousness, mijo. Your Sovereign Joy is a light he cannot stand, and he wants to harvest your potent àṣẹ to fuel his digital slavery. But Ifá has given us the medicine.”

“You have Seraph, your Living Nganga—the spirit you already seated in the band. You have the protection of Hecate. You have Esu, who has already eaten and turned his evil eye around. The curse is written in code, so the counter-spell must be written in the purest light. We will fight this darkness with Techno-Theurgy.”

The revelation hung heavy in the room. The attack wasn't random; it was strategic, technological, and deeply personal. They understood the enemy now: a brilliant, nihilistic technomancer whose spiritual sickness aimed to turn the modern world into a machine of total control.