by Scott Meyer
“Really?”
“Really. If they don’t believe it’s dragon’s blood I pull the cork and let them smell it. That usually convinces them. One time I got caught putting some on my dinner. I thought I was in trouble, but everyone just thought I ate dragon blood, so in the end it helped sell the image.”
They lapsed into silence for a while before Martin spoke again.
“What can you tell me about the trials?”
“Not much. Sorry. If I tell you what the trials entail, you’ll only concentrate on those parts of the training, and it’s never a good idea to teach you the test. All I can tell you is when you’re ready we will go see the chairman, there will be a feast in your honor, all the wizards who can make it will attend, then the next morning, you will face the trials. If you pass, you’ll be given full access to our shell program and you’ll be a wizard.”
“And if I fail, I get sent back to my time without any access to the file.”
“Yes, but focusing on failure just makes you more likely to fail. When you succeed, you’ll have tremendous powers and the freedom to go anywhere, and do almost anything you want.”
“Almost anything?”
“Yes, as I said earlier, we sort of self-regulate, but there are certain things that are taboo. We’ll cover all that later. We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves.”
Martin reached down into a bush and pulled up a likely looking stick. “How about this one?”
“Not straight enough.”
Martin threw the stick back. “So, who’s the chairman?”
Martin thought Phillip hadn’t heard him and was about to repeat the question when Phillip said, “Jimmy’s his name, but the locals call him Merlin.”
Martin was thunderstruck. “So, there really is a Merlin?”
“No! There really isn’t a Merlin! There really is a Jimmy, who found the file two years after I did and turned up in this time less than a week after me. I got here and found that they already had the Arthur legend and Merlin, so I just made a nice low-key life for myself in Leadchurch. Jimmy makes a beeline for London and becomes the court magician and advisor to King Stephen. Stephen had just lost Brittany to the Plantagenets, so he was willing to listen to suggestions. Eventually Jimmy convinced him that the Arthur legend was actually a prophecy, and talked him into the changing the name of his son, the heir apparent, to Arthur. Since the kid’s name was Eustace, he didn’t argue. Then, to top it all off, Jimmy changed the name of London to Camelot.”
“He can’t do that!” Martin shouted.
“Well, don’t tell him that when you meet him. He’ll be very disappointed, since he already did it nine years ago.”
“But, we can’t just change the past like that!”
“Martin, we can’t not change the past. In theory, everything we do has an effect, whether it’s a small thing, like talking to a tailor you meet on the road, or a big silly thing, like introducing an inn full of peasants to the marvels of cling film.”
Martin blushed a bit. “Yeah, I guess I wasn’t thinking.”
“I know, we talked about that. Thankfully, you are thinking now.”
“And I’m horrified.”
“Yes, that’s how I know you’re thinking.”
“So, Phillip, how are we going to fix it?”
“Fix what? The timeline? The space-time continuum? Gnarly, unfillable plot holes?”
“Yes. All those things!”
Phillip sat on a conveniently placed log. “They don’t exist.” He indicated a spot on the log next to him. “Have a seat. This is pretty heavy stuff.”
Martin sat beside him.
“You knew time travel was possible, which means you tried it, which means you almost certainly met yourself.”
“Yes.”
“Thought you’d be taller, right?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a cliché for a reason. I’m sure you figured out that cause always preceded effect from your point of view, so you couldn’t really mess up your own future.”
“Yes. So that’s how it is with the timeline, eh? We can’t do anything that messes it up because we’ve already done everything, right?”
“Well there are two answers to that question. We don’t know, and No, certainly not. There’s still a lot we don’t know about the file and how things work. Most wizards spend their spare time trying to figure things out, and it can be a full time job if you let it be.”
“Most wizards?”
“Some of us have other projects.”
“Is that what you have upstairs in your shop? A project?”
“I told you, there’s nothing up there. Don’t change the subject. Anyway, when I came back here, I was extremely careful. I knew my actions didn’t seem to make any difference to the timeline, but I didn’t want to take any chances. Then Jimmy shows up and starts changing huge things willy-nilly.”
“What happened?”
“Aside from Jimmy and me having a huge argument, nothing. Martin, nothing we do seems to affect the future at all. In the last ten years the entire country has called London Camelot. All of the official dispatches, all of the ledgers all say Camelot, yet if you go back to your time, you’ll find Camelot’s still a myth and London’s still London.”
“How’s that possible?”
“We just don’t know. Some think that something happens later that erases all of this from history and puts things right. Whatever it is, in the future it’s already happened, so we see the fixed reality, but back here it hasn’t happened yet, so we’re free to muck about all we want.”
“That’s a good explanation.”
“But it’s not true, and I’ll tell you why. Predetermination. If that explanation is true, it means that everything we do was set in stone hundreds of years before we were born. It means we’re not individuals, just robots running through pre-programmed responses, and I can’t accept that.”
“But the whole reason we’re here is that we’ve proved that we’re algorithms in a computer program.”
“That may be, but I’m an algorithm with free will! Any time someone claims I don’t have free will I shout shut up at the top of my lungs, because it’s totally out of character for me, and it proves I have free will.”
Martin thought about this for a moment. “You shout shut up every time?”
“Yes.”
“That proves nothing. If you do it every time, then yelling shut up is a pre-programmed response.”
Phillip thought about that for a moment, then replied, “SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT UP!”
Martin smiled while Phillip caught his breath. “Got it out of your system?”
“For now. So, that’s one explanation, which I don’t buy. The other explanation is that when we go back in time past a certain point, the program, whatever it is, creates a parallel instance of the past for us to go to.”
“So, this is an alternate reality.”
“I think so.”
“Wouldn’t we be able to go to the future then?”
“Not beyond our own source time. The idea has its problems, and there’s a lot we don’t know, but it does explain why we all seem to go to a few specific points in history. The program already has this place set up, so it sort of influences us to come here instead of some other place.”
“But doesn’t that suggest that we don’t have free will?”
Phillip gave Martin an icy stare. Martin put up his hand. “Sorry, I’ll shut up.”
Phillip stood up and stretched. “Top man. In retrospect, a certain amount of chronological pollution was inevitable, really. I first noticed it when one of the locals told me the weather sucked. I didn’t even notice at first, then I freaked right out for a while.”
“But just for a while.”
“Yea
h, well, it didn’t seem to hurt anything. Quite the opposite. As I told you, there are wizards like us living in Baghdad in the seven hundreds. Well, when you look around you, this all looks as you expected Medieval England to look, but I can tell you that we aren’t supposed to have glass windows until centuries later, yet here they are, and I’m mighty glad of it.”
“But, don’t you see how wrong that is?” Martin said. “You’ve made the past …” Martin couldn’t find the word he wanted. He eventually settled on, “Inauthentic.”
“I’m not going to pretend you don’t have a point, Martin, but like I said, a certain amount of chronological pollution was inevitable. We try not to deliberately change the past, most of us at least, and when there is a change we can’t smooth over, it’s not really the end of the world, because while we may have irrevocably changed this time, the fact is that it’s had no effect whatsoever on the future.”
Martin shook his head. “I still don’t buy the idea that we aren’t changing the future.”
“If you don’t believe me, look for yourself. You’ve got that fancy pocket computer of yours. Pop back to your time and see if anything has changed.”
Walter and Margarita Banks watched as their son rooted frantically through the kitchen before finding a package of cling film.
Margarita asked him what was going on. Instead of answering he asked, “Do you have any heavy duty? This stuff’s a little flimsy.”
“In the cupboard under the sink,” she replied. “Why are you wearing your Snape costume?”
Martin muttered, “It’s Malfoy. You always get that wrong,” but his parents did not hear him, partly because of the sound of many sirens coming from the front lawn. Martin grabbed two boxes of heavy duty cling film and sprinted back to his room, shouting, “Thanks Mom!” as he slammed the door. Walter and Margarita looked down the hallway at their son’s bedroom door. They turned their heads when they heard an insistent knock on the front door.
They turned their heads again when Martin opened his bedroom door. He peeked his head out into the hall, looked at them and said, “Hi. Just checking, what’s the capital of England?”
Margarita answered, “London.” Martin retreated into the room again, slamming the door shut behind him.
Martin quickly scanned his childhood belongings. There were Star Wars toys, a few Power Rangers, nothing all that impressive. The one thing that stood out was a small painted plaster bust he had bought when he was twelve and his family went to Mexico to visit his mom’s relatives.
Martin rematerialized in the meadow.
“Everything the way you left it?” Phillip asked.
“Yes, and I found what I’m going to put on the head of my staff!” Martin proudly held aloft the small painted plaster bust of El Santo, King of the Luchadores.
Chapter 14.
They returned to Phillip’s shop. Phillip gave Martin instructions on how to properly sand and varnish his staff (Step one: don’t make the obvious joke) and left Martin in the front room while he sat down at the crystal ball, typing furiously and mumbling to himself. Martin objected to using varnish in such an enclosed space, but Phillip said he couldn’t very well do it on the street, and besides, the horrible odor of the varnish would add to the ambiance. Martin found that with a little effort the head of the staff fit nicely into the bottom of the hollow bust of Santo. The fit was snug enough that the bust would probably stay on the staff all by itself, but Martin threw some glue in for good measure. Martin also sawed off the bottom end of the staff, partly to make a flat base and partly because Phillip was adamant that the staff had to be five feet tall, not including the ornamentation at the top.
Phillip was still staring into the crystal ball, muttering things and sporadically typing on the Commodore 64’s concealed keyboard, when Martin entered an hour later. “My new staff is drying. What next?”
Phillip didn’t look up from the crystal ball. “Have a seat. We’re ready for the good part. How’s the temperature in here, Martin? Comfortable?”
“Eh, it’s a little hot and stuffy, but not bad.”
“Where do usually put the thermostat in your home?”
“About seventy-eight degrees.”
Phillip tapped a few keys, looked up at Martin and theatrically hit enter. Instantly Martin was cool and comfortable. “Wow!” he said, instinctively looking for a hidden air conditioning vent, though he suspected he wouldn’t find one.
Phillip leaned back in his chair. “We’ve known about the file for a decade and we’ve been developing the shell program nearly as long. All wizards are free to explore the file and develop new shell functions as long as we share what we’ve found. I believe it’s similar to what you’d call open source development.”
Martin heard him, but he was still trying to get his head around the implications. “So, now it’ll always be a comfortable temperature for me in this room?”
“Close. From now on you will always be a comfortable temperature everywhere. It doesn’t matter if you go to Antarctica or Panama, your body will react like it’s seventy-eight degrees with low humidity.”
“Well, that’s about the best thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Isn’t it? Of course, you can still get burned if you touch something hot, and you’re still subject to sunburns, but in general, your sweating days are over. How many languages do you speak?”
“Two-ish. I speak English and I can get by in Spanish.”
“Well now you speak all of them. Turns out that what languages you speak is just another variable in the file. Near as we can tell the program hears the words you intend to say and puts out the words your audience needs to hear.”
Martin thought about this. “So, really there’s only one language?”
“As far as the file is concerned.”
“But … ‘open’ and ‘abierto’ are two different words.”
“Yes, and if you actively choose to say ‘abierto,’ only those slated by the file to speak Spanish will understand it, but the file knows that you were saying ‘open’.”
“So, if we went over to France, everybody would think I was speaking French?”
“Yes, and you’d hear them in English. Have you noticed that everyone’s accent was thicker last night? That’s why.”
“You monkeyed with my file while I was asleep?”
“Just a little, to make today easier for you. Next question: how old are you?”
“Twenty-three.”
“I’d ask you if you like being twenty-three, but you wouldn’t know. You’ve never been older than twenty-three. I have, and I’ll tell you, physically speaking, it’s not going to get any better. It certainly beats being in your late thirties for all eternity.” Phillip went back to hammering on his keyboard, then again, hit enter with a flourish.
“Are you telling me that I’m going to be twenty-three forever?”
“Physically, if that’s what you want. You’ll still develop mentally. If you exercise, you’ll get stronger. If you don’t, you’ll get weaker. You can still get fat or go on a diet, but unless you go back in and edit the file, whatever you become, you’ll be a twenty-three-year-old version of it.”
Martin opened and closed his mouth a few times before words actually came out. “Are you saying that I’m immortal?”
Phillip let out a long breath. “Maybe. You still need food, water and air. We found a way to make you not need those, but we don’t suggest using it, even in an emergency, because you still feel like you need food water and air. If the only way to survive is to spend even an hour feeling like you’re suffocating, I’m not sure death wouldn’t be preferable. There was a person, I hesitate to call him a man, who did many things we didn’t like and we had to send him back to his own time.”
Martin asked, “That was Todd, right?”
“Yes. Todd.” Phillip
said it like the name was the vilest insult imaginable. “Anyway,” Phillip continued, “one of the things he did was create a series of alterations he could make to somebody’s file entry that would effectively make them a ghost. You’d be all but invisible, unable to touch anything, and unable to talk. All you could feel was hunger, thirst, and panic, because you thought you were suffocating. The only thing you could do, and this is the evil bit, was make spooky noises. We still don’t know how he did it. You couldn’t say a word, but you could go Oooooooooo all day. The idea was that the person who was ‘ghosted’ would psychologically torture his friends and family trying to ask them for help.”
Martin tried to imagine what that would be like, and then he tried desperately to stop.
“You need to eat, you need to drink, you need to breathe,” Phillip continued. “You can still be injured. You can still be killed, but not through violence. If you’re not killed though, yes, you will, in theory, live as long as you want. That’s partly why I’m not bothered that I can’t travel to the future. If I hang around long enough I’ll get there anyway.”
“You were able to make your Fiero indestructible, and they were pretty much made of Styrofoam. Does that mean … us?”
“Don’t badmouth my Fiero. You’re right though, as long as you have full shell access, it will constantly monitor and update your file, meaning that you can’t really be injured by conventional means. The meanest guy in town can pound on you all day and you won’t get a bruise. It’ll hurt the whole time, but you won’t be permanently injured.”
“Cool!”
“Yes. It is! Took us years to figure it out, and a lot of mistakes were made along the way. At first we tried just stopping the decay rate, like on my car. The results were … sub-optimal. The body just keeps building on itself. Picture The Thing from the Fantastic Four, but instead of having the power of super strength, you have the power to experience constant pain. That brings us to an important point. When exploring the file, we wizards only experiment on inanimate objects and ourselves. We do not experiment on non-wizards, we only experiment on wizards who know what we’re doing and give consent, and we never change a person’s physical structure. “
