Off to Be the Wizard (3 page)

Chapter 4.

The next morning Martin woke up with a hangover. He hadn’t drunk much while playing poker with himself. Just a few beers.

The first round, when he was Past Martin, he lost badly. Then he went back in time and played through it all again as Future Martin. To be honest, he wasn’t that into the second round at first and had mainly gone back and offered to play out of a sense of obligation. Then he started winning, because he could remember some of the hands Past Martin had. Any game is more enjoyable when you’re winning, although in the end he broke even. He shuffled off to bed, as tired as he’d ever been in his life, but with his brain firing at full steam. He thought about what would have happened if he’d won the first round of poker, then come back and won again. Was that possible, and if so, where would the winnings come from? Could he create infinite wealth by losing at poker against himself? Of course, he could create infinite wealth anyway, by simply moving a decimal point in the file.

He eventually realized that if he was going to get any sleep he was going to have to force the issue, so he downed his now nightly cocktail, two sleeping pills and a shot of bargain-brand bourbon.

Now it was morning, and he had a hangover.

He sat at his desk, eating toaster waffles and drinking coffee while he stared at the file. The night before had been a dazzling rollercoaster of discovery, but the morning after was, as usual, a grim slog through the bumper-to-bumper commute of reality. He had proven that the file was a tool that could improve every aspect of his life. His aching feet, twisted ankle, and jammed wrists, as well as his ruined socks and his confused neighbor, all proved that he could also ruin his life if he continued to act without thinking first.

He had already decided not to change his body anymore. Until he understood the file much better it was too dangerous. Better to just create money and buy a health club membership, or plastic surgery if needed. He had also decided that rather than add a huge amount of money to his bank account, he would occasionally add small amounts. He hoped this would help him evade detection.

He could fly, briefly. Really, he could place himself in midair for a moment before he fell to the ground. He had an idea of how to fix that, but it wasn’t his first priority.

He could teleport. This was amazing, but also very dangerous. Happily, his clothes had teleported with him. He reasoned that the file, or the system that used the file, must define your clothes and the things in your immediate possession in relation to your location, just like it tracks your location in relation to the Earth. That was a relief. Martin didn’t want to have to explain to the police why he had materialized naked in a public place. Really, he didn’t want to explain to the police why he had materialized at all. He needed to make sure if he was going to teleport someplace, that in addition to having the right longitude, latitude, and altitude, he would need solitude. He needed a landing zone where nobody would see him.

Lastly, he could go back in time and return to his starting point, but he couldn’t go forward beyond that. He reasoned that this was because the past was a known state, but the future had not happened yet, and was unknowable and unreachable. He didn’t know for sure, and likely never would. The point was, he could go back in time, and return to the present. Essentially, he was just teleporting to another time as well as another place. So, the parameters he needed were longitude, latitude, altitude, solitude, and … when.

The only way he could do all of these things was to access the file. He could access it from his computer and now from his smartphone. Public computers were out of the question. He couldn’t install the software he’d need to securely access the remote computer that hosted the file. It looked like his phone was going to be his primary means of access to the file from now on, so he needed to make sure he didn’t transport himself any place that the phone wouldn’t work, or he’d be stuck. He pulled up his carrier’s coverage map. It was now a map, not only of
reliable
high speed data access, but also of the places where Martin had God-like powers over time and space. That shouldn’t have felt limiting, but it did.

I can instantly travel anywhere I want,
he thought,
on this map of the continental United States, as long as where I’m going is in one of the red blobs. The dark red blobs. The lighter ones are iffy.

For the first time since finding the file, Martin Banks thought before he acted. He made a list of things he needed to do before he could proceed, arranged them in a logical order, and started working down the list.

He searched the file for his phone’s serial number and model name. He was relieved to find them. He was afraid that the file would only cover people, but that clearly was not the case. The file was immense (much larger than even the huge listed file size) but not infinite, and he wasn’t sure it was large enough for all people and all objects, but there it was, an entry for his phone. The entry wasn’t very large. He supposed, as with people, that mass-produced items like phones didn’t need to be described in detail for every copy. Instead, each copy had an entry that described how it differed from others of its type, but the full description of what made it a phone resided in a separate file somewhere else.

He spent some time making a rudimentary smartphone app to automatically edit the file. He found the phone’s battery level. In the file it was accurate down to five decimal places. On the phone it was totally inaccurate unless you installed a separate app, which only gave you the reading in whole numbers. He verified that he had the battery level by checking the file against the battery app, then playing a juice-hungry game on the phone for five minutes. He rechecked the battery level and was sure he had the right field. He set the experimental app to run in the background, resetting the battery level to one-hundred percent every ten seconds. He played the game again for another five minutes. Afterward, the battery was still full.

After an hour of searching, copying, and pasting, he had modified his phone to always have seventy-three percent battery remaining (one-hundred percent would have looked suspicious). This would save him from needing a bunch of spare batteries and carrying them in a bandolier like Chewbacca.

He also made his phone always broadcast to and from an area that was covered by three separate cell towers and two power substations, no matter where the phone was actually located. It was an intuitive leap, but Martin now understood that the radio waves produced by the phone were just as artificial as everything else, and could also be manipulated.

He had a harder time trying to reason his way through time travel. In the cold light of day, Martin could see he’d been incredibly reckless in even attempting it. He’d also been incredibly lucky. In theory, once he’d gone back in time, there would have been two of him being described by the file at the same time, which you’d think would result in some sort of error, which would be a bad thing. It hadn’t, though. Martin had reasoned that there was a program somewhere that accessed the file and used it to render the world, and that the moment he was experiencing at any given time was as far as this theoretical program had gotten.

Martin couldn’t prove anything beyond the existence of the repository file, but that was enough. He thanked himself for about the millionth time for having learned to program computers, and got to work. When the weekend was over his app was good enough for the moment.

The app had three tabs. The first tab’s icon was a dollar sign. It told him his checking account balance, and allowed him to quickly change it. The app made the necessary edits to the file automatically.

The second tab’s icon was a compass. It used a popular mapping program’s A.P.I. to display a satellite map of the earth. He could zoom in to look at an area, select a spot and the app would input the coordinates and altitude into the file. A heartbeat later, he would be there. There was also a dialog box where he could enter a date and time. If he didn’t specify a date and time, the app kept him in the present. There was a button to take him back to wherever and whenever he was when he last time traveled. A temporal undo button, if you like. Handy for if he found himself someplace he didn’t want to be. He also had a list of places he’d teleported to and from. He could mark certain places and times as favorites to make it easy to get back to them.

The third tab was labeled
?!
. That tab had three buttons. The first button’s purpose was to prove to people that he had the power he now had. If he hit it, the app would add three feet to his altitude. The button was labeled
Hover
. He hadn’t figured out a way to alter his altitude and have it just stay altered, so instead his app would re-enter the change ten times a second, keeping him in the air until he hit the button again. He tried it, and the experience was unpleasant, but nothing he couldn’t handle. The second button said
Home
. One press would take him back to his apartment. The third button was bright red and said
Escape
. Martin had given that one some thought.

Martin was sure that nothing he’d done was immoral. He hadn’t hurt anybody. He’d just helped himself. He was also pretty sure nothing he had done was illegal. Who writes laws against bending space and time to your will? But he was also certain that if anybody ever found out what he was doing, he would be in big trouble. If he was lucky, they’d just throw him in prison and keep his discovery for themselves. If he was unlucky, he’d be dissected as an alien. He knew that if things went south, he needed an escape plan. He tried to think of someplace he could go where no government or corporation could find him. He knew that in this day and age, that was a problem, but he also saw that was the answer.
This day and age
. He could escape to the past, and nobody alive today could touch him.

He knew that the things the file allowed him to do would seem like magic to anyone who witnessed them. If he was going to escape to a point in the past, it should be a time when magic was believed to exist. That way, instead of people yelling, “Magic! It must be some kind of trick! Let’s beat him until he tells us the secret,” hopefully they would yell, “Magic! I’ve heard of that! I’ve never seen it in person, though!”

The trick was finding a time and place where the next sentence wouldn’t be “Let’s burn him!”

He tried to think of an example from history of a magician who had been revered. The only names he came up with were Houdini and Merlin. Houdini died after he was punched in the gut by a fan. That didn’t seem promising. Merlin was King Arthur’s wizard, and also probably fictional. Even if a real person had been the germ of the legend, he certainly hadn’t had any powers. He was probably just a shaman who was good at looking mysterious. He had parlayed that into a life of some prestige and a legend that had lasted until today.
That’ll do
, Martin thought.

He did a little research. Very little. He didn’t expect to ever use the escape button. He just wanted to have the option. First he looked into the idea of trying to become Merlin himself.
Someone has to do it
, he thought. That idea died ignominiously within the first minute of his research. Nobody knew for sure when, where, for how long, or indeed if Merlin had lived. The one thing all of the scholars seemed to agree on was that if Merlin or any of the characters from the Arthur legend had existed, they probably did so in the sixth century, not a particularly pleasant time to be alive. Martin let that idea go. Instead, he ran a search for the phrase
the best time to live in Medieval England.
The third result in the list was a link to the Amazon page for a book entitled
The Best Years to Live in Medieval England
, by Gilbert Cox. Martin read the product description:

In this, his seminal work, popular historian and television presenter Gilbert Cox makes his case that the period between 1140 and 1160, placed as they were, after the Battle of Hastings, before the Murder of Thomas à Beckett, and well before the Black Death, was the absolute best time to live in Medieval England.

Good enough for me
, Martin thought. He split the difference and set the escape date for 1150, and the place for Dover, because the white cliffs were the only geological landmark in England he could think of. He considered Stonehenge, but he didn’t want to materialize in the middle of a bunch of Druids.

It was only a precaution. He made the escape button, but he hoped to never use it.

As it happened, he used it within forty-eight hours.

Chapter 5.

Martin was happy to go back to work. After being cooped up in his apartment all weekend, thinking complicated thoughts and wrangling computer code, it was nice to get out and be around people. He drove to work, his car a sunny little island of calm in the middle of the swollen river of misery that was the morning commute.

Martin was done worrying about the philosophical implications of his discovery. He had finally come to see it like this: some say the universe was created by God, and we are powerless pawns to his whim. Some say the universe was created by random chance, and we are powerless specks in a vast, indifferent ocean. Martin could prove that the world was created by a computer program, which made no difference, because who created the program? God? Random chance? He hadn’t answered the question, he had just pushed it back one step. The difference was that people weren’t powerless pawns or powerless specks. People were powerless subroutines, or at least everyone was but Martin! Powerlessness didn’t seem so bad when you only saw it in other people.

Martin had the easy air of a man with a plan. He would continue to live as he always had, but with no money problems, and the ability to go wherever he wanted on his days off. He would live a life billionaires would envy. Total freedom and total anonymity, and the best part was, he didn’t have to change anything. All he had to do was keep a low profile, and there was no profile lower than the one he already had. He would keep his current job, keep his current car, and keep his current apartment. All of those things could change in time, but for now the way forward was to stop all progress.

As he walked into the cubicle farm, it looked different to him. A week ago he saw it as a fluorescent-lighted, beige-walled abattoir for the human spirit where he had to spend most of his time. Now he saw it as a fluorescent-lighted, beige-walled abattoir for the human spirit where he
chose
to spend most of his time. It was like a corporate drone fantasy camp.

He sat smiling at his desk, humming as he took papers from his inbox, entered the pertinent information from the form into the proper field of the database, then deposited the form in his outbox.

He went to the break room. A woman he had known for two years without learning her last name was staring at the water cooler. Her first name was Becky. She had a pale complexion and limp, dishwater blond hair that somehow perfectly matched her faded, threadbare business suit
. In its way, it is a cohesive look,
Martin thought.

“How are you?” Martin asked.

“Bored,” she replied.

Martin said, “I know, right? Everything about this place is breathtakingly dull, isn’t it?”

“YES!” She looked around to see if anyone else was listening, but they were alone. “Have you ever found yourself hoping, just for a second, that you’ll get into a car accident?”

“TOTALLY!” Martin said, louder than he’d intended. “Because it would be interesting!”

“Yeah, nothing where anybody got seriously hurt. I don’t want that,” she explained.

“No. Just hurt enough that you get to go to the Emergency Room.”

“Hmmmm. Maybe ride in an ambulance and have two beefy guys in uniforms help me. A broken arm is the sweet spot. You need immediate attention, and you get out of work for a couple of weeks, but you’re not debilitated or anything,” She trailed off, lost in her fantasy.

They stood in silence for a minute.

“Well,” she said, “I have to go back to work.”

“I guess you do,” Martin said. “They don’t pay us to stand around talking.”

She smiled. She had a great smile. Martin had never seen it before. She said, “They certainly don’t pay us enough to justify doing our jobs,” as she left the break room.

And she’s a manager
, Martin thought.
If I work really hard, I might get promoted to her job someday.

At noon, as everyone else was going to lunch, Martin was carrying a cardboard box full of his belongings out to the car. Quitting wasn’t nearly as difficult as he’d imagined.

When his supervisor asked why he was going, Martin said, “I’d rather do something that makes me happy.”

His former supervisor smiled the smile equivalent of a middle finger. “Well, with an attitude like that, we don’t want you.”

His plan was already destroyed, but Martin saw it was a stupid plan. Keep doing something that made him miserable so he could fit in with the miserable people. What he should have tried to do was find some happy people to fit in with. Maybe he could go back to school. He’d hated college so much that he dropped out, but that was when he believed his future was riding on it. Maybe now that he knew it was meaningless he’d enjoy it.

When he returned to his apartment, he saw it as if for the first time. White stucco walls and a beige carpet. If you looked at the floor in broad daylight, you could see the traffic pattern. Faint wear tracks traced the routes from the bed to the bathroom to the kitchen to the computer to the couch.

It was time for a lifestyle upgrade. He knew it wasn’t necessary, but on a deeper level he knew he needed it. He’d been good, hadn’t he? He’d known about the file for almost a week and he hadn’t done anything with it to benefit himself. Yes, he had put eight thousand dollars into his bank account, but he could argue that he earned that money by discovering the means to procure it. Besides, he already had that money. Even if getting it was wrong, spending it now wasn’t. It was just the logical conclusion of an act he did days ago. In a sense, it was already done. He made a quick mental list of things he wanted to replace. He figured eight thousand dollars would go pretty far.

A day later he reflected that it
had
gone pretty far. All the way to the checkout line at IKEA. He had carefully selected his purchases to stay under his eight thousand dollar budget, and had just managed it. Looking at the pile of flat-pack, he knew he couldn’t carry it home in his car. He pulled out his phone, looked at his now single-digit bank balance, adjusted it up to five thousand dollars, and went to rent a truck.

By five p.m., his new furniture was in his apartment waiting for assembly. His old furniture was sitting on the pavement behind a thrift store. The truck was returned to the rental agency. Martin settled in for a night of serious furniture assembling. He went to the closet and pulled out Her First Tool Kit. He looked at it in his hand.

By six p.m. Martin was back with his new tool kit, a massive metal case full of sockets, wrenches, screwdrivers, even a saw. He also had a drill he could use to drive screws.

As he assembled the furniture, he mused that unlimited money was like a superpower. It allowed one to do almost anything. Hire a plane to make you fly. Hire a truck to carry heavy things. Hire doctors to keep you healthy. Hire mercenaries to vanquish foes. You could pay someone to do anything, and at the end of the day, you were responsible for having gotten it done.

He still hadn’t decided what to do with his life. He wanted it to be something he could be proud of. Maybe he’d create a comic book. Hire a writer to flesh out his ideas. Hire an artist to draw it. “Rich Man: He pays people to serve justice.” It was an idea.

By eleven that night he was exhausted, and he slept without assistance for the first time in a week. The next morning he arranged his new furniture. He started installing his computer on his new desk. He put the 18-inch monitor on the desktop. He put the dusty CPU tower under the desk. He started to hook up the tangle of wires, then he laughed at himself for being so stupid.

The closest electronics store opened at eleven. At ten past he was walking to his car with a new high-end, all-in-one computer that looked like a huge monitor with a keyboard attached. Soon, it was hooked up and purring like a kitten, and his old computer was running a utility to completely erase the hard drive. He turned his attention to his entertainment center.

Martin looked at the large TV cabinet he had purchased, and the smallish TV he had owned for years. An hour and a half later he was pulling into his parking space with the new TV he’d bought at the second closest electronics store (going back to the same one would have looked suspicious). He was so excited that he got careless removing the TV’s box from the rear hatch, and ripped the headliner of his car.
Damn
, he thought,
I wonder how much that’ll cost to fix
.

Buying a new car took longer than buying a new TV. He had saved some time by not making any attempt to negotiate. He’d simply excused himself to use the restroom and adjusted his bank account so he had the down payment. The dealership’s sales team seemed stunned when he returned from the restroom and asked if they could hurry this up.

He was proud that he had the forethought to get a payment plan. He could have paid cash, but that would look suspicious. This way, he was building a credit rating, which would make him look more normal on paper, and in the end it was all money he was creating out of nothing anyway. Who cared if the interest rate caused him to spend more of it?

Also, he could have gone nuts and bought a Ferrari or something, but he hadn’t. He just got another bright red hatchback. The sport model. It had a stripe, got to seventy-five miles per hour an eighth of a second faster, and the tires wore out faster while only costing twice as much to replace. 

He drove home with a dopey grin on his face. He threw his jacket in a heap in the passenger seat and passed the time on his drive home playing with the car stereo at every red light.

Martin Banks felt pretty smart, right up until he pulled up to his parking space and saw two men in dark suits. Martin was startled, but reminded himself he had done nothing illegal (as far as he knew) and that there was no reason that these two men would be there for him. For all he knew, they wanted to tell him about God. He got out of the car and made eye contact with one of the men (it was pretty much unavoidable). The man smiled.

“Hello, Mr. Banks. Nice car.”

Martin’s heart clenched like a fist. His mouth went dry. He looked at the men as if through a long tunnel.

“Do you want to talk to me about God?” Martin asked.

“Not unless he paid for the car,” the man answered.