Off to Be the Wizard (2 page)

Chapter 2.

The alarm went off at seven. Martin was still under the influence of the pills he’d taken, so while his eyes were open and his body was moving, his brain was not. He showered. He brushed his teeth. He shaved. Usually his brain would have slowly come awake, but Martin was actively choosing not to think. As he walked through his apartment, his eyes locked on the shaky pencil marks on his bedroom door jamb. He stared for a moment, grimaced, and then shut his brain down again. He made coffee and toaster waffles. He glared at his computer as he ate. He read the news on his smartphone this morning. It felt safer that way.

He drove his hatchback to work. When he got to work he didn’t remember anything about the drive. He sat in his cubicle and shuffled paperwork. At quitting time he realized he could remember almost nothing about his day. He had drifted through it in a haze. He walked to the parking lot, sat in his car, and looked at himself in the rearview mirror. This couldn’t go on. He resolved then and there that he would spend the rest of his life pretending that the file didn’t exist.

He drove home as fast as he could, and when he got there, he immediately went to his computer and opened the file. He’d reasoned that he couldn’t pretend that the file didn’t exist unless he figured out exactly what it was.

He searched for his name again, and again found the chunk of data that defined his existence. He knew where his height was, but the other useful metrics proved harder to define. His intelligence, his percentage of body-fat, his strength, and his level of health were all impossible to objectively quantify, regardless of what people pitching diet plans said.

He found his weight, but dared not change it. He reasoned that weighing less didn’t mean necessarily being less fat. He could easily render himself less dense. He could imagine his parents attending his funeral, being asked how their son had died and having to admit that nobody could explain it, but he’d somehow spontaneously become a foam.

Martin took a different approach. He pulled up his banking app on his smartphone and looked up his bank account balance. He searched for that number in the file and found it immediately. He took a deep breath, moved the decimal point one place to the right and hit save.

He refreshed his banking app. His balance read $835.00.

SUCCESS!

He felt a pang. Not a pang of conscience. He hadn’t stolen money from anybody. He’d created it out of thin air. The money hadn’t existed. Now it did. The way he saw it, he’d done the world a favor! The pang was fear. He knew this was too easy, and if the authorities found out what he’d done he would be punished, even if it wasn’t technically against the law. Martin moved the decimal point back one space and walked away from the computer for the night.

Again, he watched TV without ever noticing what was on. Again, he lay in bed without going to sleep. Again, he resorted to over the counter sleep aids and inexpensive bourbon to get the rest he needed.

The next day was Friday. He sailed through work like the Flying Dutchman. The ship was moving, but nobody was at the helm. His supervisor was concerned that Martin was acting strangely, but he was getting more work done than usual, so she chose not to interfere with a good thing.

Martin realized that he couldn’t ignore the file. What he’d learned he could not un-learn. He was just going to have to show some willpower. He put a great deal of thought into all the things he should not do. Things that might be possible, using the file, but would probably lead to no good. Having spent all Friday collecting dangerous ideas, that night when he sat at his computer, he had no shortage of things to try, and a whole weekend to try them in.

Chapter 3.

First, Martin selected the entire chunk of data that he now believed was essentially him, and copied it to a separate file, which he encrypted and copied to the storage card on his phone.

The second thing Martin did was move the decimal on his bank account three spots to the right. He considered making himself a millionaire, but why risk it when he could make himself a thousandaire anytime he wanted.

I have to be careful
, he thought.
I don’t want to screw this up.

At first he wondered how something as complex as a human being could be described in a chunk of data that was small enough to be managed, but once he calmed down and thought about it, he could see how it might work. He saw that the file was a list of parameters, but not detailed descriptions. He could see the code that defined his heart. He verified this by taking his pulse and watching the numbers fluctuate in real time. The numbers made no sense to him. They might not even make sense to a cardiologist, but they changed predictably in time with his pulse. The code described what the heart was doing, and the ways in which it might differ from other people’s hearts, but not what it, as a heart, was. It was as if somewhere else there was another file that described human hearts in detail, and every person’s data referred to that to render their specific heart. The same went for all the other organs, although this was much less interesting to him once he realized that he had no access to the fundamental structure of his body, and could not, for example, make his skeleton an unbreakable metal.

There were other shortcuts built into the system as well. He ran a search for his current longitude and latitude. He understood the notation thanks to a brief flirtation in his late teens with
geocaching, and had access to the actual numbers thanks to his smartphone. When he found his exact coordinates in the file he decided to move around and see if they changed. He walked backward slowly while peering at his monitor with an ever-increasing squint. The numbers appeared to be changing as he moved. So, instead of tracking each person’s absolute position in space, the system tracked them in relation to the Earth. After the coordinates there was a number that he saw was his height above sea level. Martin jumped, and though it was hard to read the screen while jumping, he could see that the number changed while he was in midair, then returned to its starting point by the time he landed.

Martin knew what he had to do next. If he didn’t try, he’d wonder for the rest of his life.

No, that’s not true,
he thought.
I’d wonder until I eventually broke down and tried it anyway, so I might as well try it now.

He hunched over the desk without sitting, swallowed hard and increased his altitude notation by one foot. He exhaled slowly.

“Now we see if I can fly,” he said out loud to posterity, posterity in this case being his empty apartment. He hit the enter key.

Instantly he was one foot off the ground. Just as instantly he was falling one foot to the ground. Slightly less instantly his full weight came down hard on the floor and his desk, jamming both of his wrists and twisting his right ankle. He was almost able to remain upright, but eventually fell backward very hard into his desk chair, which bent permanently from the strain and knocked the wind out of him. As he sat, trying to get the air back into his lungs, he could hear his downstairs neighbor hitting her ceiling with a broom and yelling at him to quiet down.

Okay,
Martin thought,
I can’t fly, but I can fall whenever I want.

Martin turned his attention back to the longitude and latitude. He took his smartphone to the far corner of his bedroom and noted the GPS reading. He returned to the computer, sat down and entered the coordinates. He took a deep breath, hit enter, and he was in the far corner of his bedroom. His feet were on solid ground, but the rest of him was in a seated position with no chair beneath him. His weight came down on his tailbone. It didn’t break, but it felt like it wanted to. He took a moment before he got up and walked back to the computer. The downstairs neighbor was hitting the ceiling even harder and yelling even louder. He pictured her trying to get her damage deposit back, claiming the hundreds of broom handle marks had been there when she moved in. This made him smile.

He now knew he could teleport. He also knew that he had to put thought into how he’d do it, or he could seriously hurt himself. Again, he looked at the GPS app. He picked a spot about a mile away, a place that would be well lit, but where nobody would see him: the side parking lot of a Boston Market franchise. He entered the coordinates, stood up, bent his knees to absorb any shocks, extended his arms slightly for better balance, gritted his teeth, and hit enter.

He was in the side parking lot of the Boston Market. He was glad that he hadn’t changed out of his work clothes when he got home, and that his wallet was still in his pocket. He wished he’d kept his shoes on, and his keys in his pocket, but you can’t have everything. He lived in the Pacific Northwest, so he was grateful that only the pavement was wet and not the air itself. He walked home, eating a bad Boston Market meatloaf sandwich, thinking about what he would do next, both about the file and his spare apartment keys, which he’d left with his downstairs neighbor.

Who better?
He thought
. She’s always home. She pays close attention to what’s going on.

His wrists, ankle, and tailbone hurt, but the walk home and the ruining of a good pair of wool socks were totally worth it, both for the time it gave him to think and for the look on his downstairs neighbor’s face.

“Why are you being so loud up there?” she asked.

“What do you mean? I wasn’t home. I walked to Boston Market. See?” he said, holding up his sandwich wrapper and his now-empty drink cup. “It’s exactly one mile away, so I’ve been gone a while.”

“You could have driven.”

“If I had my car keys, I’d have my apartment keys.”

“Why aren’t you wearing shoes?”

He looked at his feet.

“I like to walk quietly. You know that.”

He returned to his apartment a tired but happy man.

He minimized the file for a bit and went to the Android smartphone app store. With some effort he found a combination of emulators that could pull up the file on his phone. No more walking home, or really, anywhere.

He had one more item on his mental to-do list.

He spent quite a while searching before he found the fields for the date and time. He was past being surprised to find these entries in forms he could easily understand. He figured the program had just passed these concepts on to the people it created as a short cut. Why spend cycles creating new notation systems when it can just give people ones it already knows will work and get on with rendering trees?

He looked at the time notation for a long time. It was, essentially, the world’s most accurate clock. The numbers seemed off until he realized it was Greenwich Mean Time.

He was going to try time travel. He couldn’t not try, even though he was terrified of the whole idea. He carefully added thirty seconds to the time notation, hit enter, and … nothing happened. He double checked. The time notation hadn’t accepted his input. He tried again, with identical results.

Martin let out a long breath, and said, “It’s probably just as well.”

A voice from the corner of the room said, “Try going back in time, not forward.”

Martin jumped, then looked toward the source of the voice. He saw himself standing in the corner, holding his smartphone, which Martin was also holding. Martin was looking at himself. Not a picture. Not a reflection. He was seeing him.

He’d expected himself to be better looking.

They stared at each other for a moment. Finally, time-traveler Martin spoke. “I said, you should try going back in time, instead of forward.”

Original Martin was too busy freaking out to listen, and didn’t catch what Future Martin said.

“What?” Martin asked, snapping out of it.

Future Martin shook his head. “Great, now I’m confused.”

“
You’re
confused?!”

Future Martin looked irritated. He muttered something under his breath as he tapped at the smartphone in his hand. He looked up once more, made eye contact with Original Martin, and disappeared.

Martin walked over to the spot where his double had stood. No scorch marks or anything. Martin didn’t know what he expected would happen to the area someone time traveled into, then away from in quick succession, but he knew he expected more than nothing.

Martin looked at his phone and saw the file’s time field, ticking off the seconds. He quickly subtracted about thirty seconds from the time and hit enter.

The world around him did a fairly fast dissolve between
now
and the dusty memory that was the world half a minute ago. He saw Past Martin standing in the middle of the room, absorbed in his phone screen, looking disappointed.

Past Martin exhaled and said, “It’s probably just as well.”

Martin felt sorry for Past Martin.
I looked so sad,
he thought.

“Try going back in time instead of forward,” Martin suggested helpfully.

Past Martin was badly startled. He looked at Martin with genuine panic in his eyes, which quickly cycled through incredulity, amazement, and, to Martin’s lasting dismay, disappointment.

Great,
Martin thought.
I’m dumpy looking, and easy to read.

Martin decided to try again. “I said, you should try going back in time, instead of forward.”

Past Martin opened and closed his mouth a couple of times. Finally, he managed to ask “What?”

Martin was not impressed with himself. “Great,” he said, “now I’m confused.”

Past Martin looked genuinely affronted. “
You’re
confused?!”

Martin gave up. “Fantastic,” he muttered as he reset the time. “I’m the first man in history to meet himself, and I learn that I’m an ugly idiot.”

Martin hit enter, and watched his former self disappear as he returned to the moment after he left.

That didn’t go well,
Martin thought. Upon reflection, he should have expected it. First meetings are always awkward, even if you’re meeting yourself.
Next time should go smoother. I’ll have a better idea how to behave, and how to react.

Martin heard a quiet
ahem
to his right. He looked, and was not surprised to see himself standing there, smiling at him.

“I’m you, an hour from now,” he said. “Wanna play some heads-up poker?”