An Unwelcome Quest (Magic 2.0 Book 3)

by Scott Meyer

  They’d spent their work time since exploring the file. Miller and Murphy seemed very excited and asked many questions, which Todd tried to answer, directing them to use his own entry as an example.

  The guard said, “Some of the guys say they heard Miller and Murphy talking. They say they’re setting up a new headquarters for their task force. Getting an office. Hiring up a staff. Setting up shop. Seems they found a way to use whatever you told them to get the Treasury Department to give them some real funding.”

  Todd smiled and asked, “Really?”

  “Yes, really!” the guard shouted. “Really, okay?! Really!”

  “Fine, okay. Sorry,” Todd said. He immediately assumed that this story was a smoke screen. The Treasury Department was, by definition, tight with money. One of the simplest applications of the file was generating unlimited amounts of cash. It was far more likely that Miller and Murphy were using this new office and staff to somehow hide and launder the money they were generating with the file. They were probably telling themselves that they’d use the money to bankroll their efforts to fight crime, but sooner or later, they’d go mad with power. Everyone who found the file did.

  Everyone but me, Todd thought. They took access away from me before I ever got the chance.

  “So, what’s any of this got to do with you?” Todd asked.

  The guard said, “Look, the thing is, I hate this place.”

  Todd said, “It’s a prison.”

  “Yeah, I know, but man, you don’t understand. I really want out of here.”

  “It’s a prison, and I’m a prisoner. I understand wanting out of here.”

  “Not like I do,” the guard said.

  “You may be right about that,” Todd said, showing more restraint than he usually had.

  “Then you’ll help me?”

  “Help you do what?” Todd sputtered. “Leave? I can’t leave myself! You can! Start walking down the hall. If a door is in your way, open it. Keep going until you’re outside. I don’t understand what you’re asking for here.”

  “I know that you’re a prisoner and I’m a guard, but I’m just as trapped as you are.”

  “No, you’re not! You go home every night!”

  “Yes,” the guard said, “but every morning, I have to come back. I have to leave my home, get in my car I pay for, and burn my gas driving myself here, to this prison, every day. You inmates never stop to think about how terrible that is for us guards, do you?”

  “No,” Todd said. “You’re right. We don’t.”

  “So you’ll help me?”

  Todd said, “I still don’t get it. You hate your job. So what? How can I help you with that? You want a reference? ‘Of all the guards who have watched me, he watched me the closest’?”

  The guard smiled. “You’re on the right track, actually. Look, you’re right. I hate my job. The problem is, they aren’t going to promote me. They’ve made that clear. But I can’t get a job anywhere else because I work at a secret prison. I can’t put it on my resume, can I? If I try to fill out a job application, it’ll look like I’ve been unemployed for a decade.”

  “I can see how that could be a problem,” Todd said.

  “Yeah, but Miller and Murphy, they’re setting up a new office. I figure they’ll probably need some help, and they know me already, so why shouldn’t I go work for them?”

  “Have you mentioned this idea to them?” Todd asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “And since you’re talking to me, I guess it didn’t go well.”

  “They said they’d consider it.”

  “Which usually means no.”

  “Yeah,” the guard agreed, “but I figure if you tell me what you told them that got the Treasury Department so excited, I can use that to get a job. You know, impress them with my moxie.”

  “Or blackmail them with the threat of taking it to another agency, or the press.”

  The guard shrugged. “Yeah, maybe, depending on what it is and how reasonable they’re willing to be.”

  “Fair enough,” Todd said. “But why should I help you?”

  The guard smiled. “Well, that’s the thing. If you don’t, that means I stay here, with you. Only, like you said, you’re an inmate. I’m a guard. You can’t really do much to make my life worse. I can do lots of things to make yours worse.”

  I’ve been in solitary confinement for seven years, Todd thought. What’s he gonna do to make that worse, mess with the air-conditioning?

  Todd did not say this. Instead, he feigned a look of fear and said, “I see your point.” Todd knew that this was his chance. This man came here intent on pulling Todd’s strings and making Todd dance. He didn’t realize that the strings could be pulled the other direction. In many ways, the puppeteer got the short end of the stick. While the puppet does the dancing and gets the applause, the puppeteer does all of the real work.

  “Okay, fine. But I can’t tell you what it is. You won’t believe it. I kinda have to show you,” Todd said, pointing. “Go see if the computer is on.”

  The guard walked around the corner, out of Todd’s sight. Todd knew that at the end of a thirty-foot hallway, just inside a locked gate, there was a computer, a desk of some sort, and a chair. He listened as the guard walked to the end of the hall. After a few seconds of silence, the guard turned and walked back. When he reached Todd’s cell, he said, “Yeah, it’s on.”

  Todd expected this. Once they’d found the file, they’d all been terrified of not being able to get to it again. Murphy had documented every move they’d made so that he could repeat it without Todd’s assistance, but he also left the computer on with the file open, just in case. Of course, there was the chance that someone would find the computer and mess with the file, but the computer was located behind several locked gates, inside a top-secret maximum security prison, by itself in a hall near an inmate that the guards actively avoided, so the risk was considered pretty slight.

  “Good,” Todd said. “What’s on the screen?”

  The guard went back to the corner, peered down the hall, and said, “A bunch of words and numbers.”

  “Yeah, Todd said, “okay, but what are they? Go look for my name. Todd Douglas. Scroll up a little if you have to, but don’t change anything.”

  Miller and Murphy had been very interested in how someone’s file entry related to their physical existence, but they’d been too cowardly to look at their own entries. It was far safer to poke around in Todd’s. Now their cowardice was paying off for the last person they’d want to help, as cowardice usually does.

  The guard nodded and walked around the corner. Todd searched his cell as quickly as he could without making noise, looking for a specific book. It was a strategy guide for a role-playing game. He didn’t have to search long. He opened to the section of the book with the maps of the various levels and locations in the game. The maps had lots of empty space around the borders, and Todd had furiously scribbled notes there whenever Miller gave him a moment of privacy.

  The guard shouted, “Found it.”

  Todd leapt to the corner of his cell closest the computer. It only got him a few feet closer, but Todd was too excited for rational thought. “Okay,” He yelled, “is there a box anywhere on the screen labeled ‘search’?”

  After a few agonizing seconds, the guard said, “Yeah. It’s in the upper right-hand corner. Is that right?”

  “Yeah, yeah, good,” Todd said. “I want you to take the block of words and numbers that has my name in it, and I want you to select the whole thing. You’ll have to scroll through a few pages, that’s fine, but get the whole block highlighted, okay?”

  The guard shouted back, “Will do.”

  Todd waited. He heard the guard curse, and his heart stopped.

  “What?!” Todd shouted. “What happened?!”

  If the guard accidentally cl
osed the program, they probably wouldn’t be able to get it back before morning. Murphy would see it and know someone had tampered with the computer. At this point, he and Miller might just decide they didn’t need Todd anymore, and then Todd would be screwed.

  “Oh,” the guard yelled, “I didn’t get the whole thing highlighted. I stopped about half a line short. Here, I’ll start over.”

  “No!” Todd said. “Don’t! That’s fine! That’ll do. We’re good. We’re good.”

  Once the file was found, Miller had abandoned his post at the corner of Todd’s cell and stood over Murphy as they discussed their discovery. Todd had strained to hear their conversation and heard them discuss his cursed magnetic field. He gathered that it was modified in the same way that Jimmy’s had been. He talked the guard through the process of finding, then modifying the magnetic field’s properties.

  There was the clacking of keys, then a long silence. Todd heard the guard stand up and walk back to the cell.

  “Did you do it?” Todd asked, trying to hide his excitement.

  The guard said, “Yeah. What did it do? What was supposed to happen?”

  Todd said, “I dunno. Say, is that a digital watch?”

  The guard said, “Yeah.”

  “What time is it?”

  The guard looked at his watch and said, “Huh, that’s weird.”

  Todd asked, “Is it broken?” and tried to hide his disappointment.

  The guard said, “Yeah,” and held his arm out so Todd could read the watch himself. “It’s just flashing twelve.”

  Todd instantly shifted gears. He had been hiding disappointment, and now he was trying to hide his glee. Being near him before they’d reset his magnetic field had clearly rebooted the watch, but it was working now. The cheap digital watch’s dull, gray screen uselessly flashing twelve was the most beautiful thing Todd had ever seen.

  The guard obviously noticed what an important moment this was for Todd. “How long have you been in here? You’ve never seen a digital watch before?”

  “No, I’ve seen plenty of digital watches,” Todd said. “That’s just a really nice one. It looks like it’s made from really good, um, plastic.”

  The guard looked down at his watch with some pride. “Yeah, well, Casio knows what they’re doing. Look, I did what you said, and nothing happened. Nothing I could see on the computer anyway. What was supposed to happen?”

  Todd tried to think fast. “I can’t say. They didn’t tell me. I don’t know what it’s supposed to do. I just know that they wanted my help finding that file, and that they were planning to do what we just did.”

  The guard asked, “Why’d they need your help to find it?”

  “Because I found it before.”

  “How’d they know that?”

  “It’s why I’m in prison,” Todd said, thinking fast. “Look at me, do I look like a criminal to you? I found that file, and whatever it is, it was important enough for them to throw me in jail.”

  The guard was clearly puzzled and was trying to solve the puzzle by the time-honored method of frowning about it. Eventually he said, “Well, that’s what you showed them, and it got them their funding and their fancy new office. Maybe if I just casually mention it to them that’ll be enough to either impress them or spook them into giving me a job, even if I don’t know what it means.”

  Todd said, “Maybe. But what if it doesn’t? What if you did it wrong, somehow, and they ask you what was supposed to happen and you don’t know?”

  “I did what you told me to. Did you tell me to do it wrong?” the guard asked.

  “Well,” Todd said, a little too loud, “I mean, you were working from instructions I was giving you without seeing the computer. I may have gotten some part of it wrong. That’s understandable, right? And if I did, you’ll look like a chump.”

  “Yeah,” the guard agreed.

  “And we don’t want that,” Todd said. “You’d be stuck here, and you’d make my life miserable, like you said.”

  The guard said, “Yeah, I would.”

  “We can keep that from happening. Just let me go have a look at the computer.”

  The guard shook his head. “Oh, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “But it is,” Todd said. “Look, you’re a trained federal prison guard, right? I’m just some guy who found the wrong file and ended up behind bars. It stands to reason that you’re smarter than me, doesn’t it? I mean, if you weren’t, I wouldn’t be your prisoner, would I? Besides, you’ll be right there watching me the whole time.”

  One minute later, Todd was out of his cell, standing in front of a functioning computer with the file open and cued up to his entry. Todd moved Murphy’s metal folding chair back away from the desk so he could stand over the keyboard. The guard stood beside him, looking quite worried, but not quite worried enough.

  Todd said, “Okay. Watch carefully. All I’m going to do is look for a specific set of numbers.”

  Todd selected his data chunk and searched for his current longitude and latitude while the guard looked on.

  Todd’s hands hovered over the keyboard for a moment while he thought. He asked the guard, “Hey, do you know what direction north is?”

  The guard pointed to the left. Todd pointed to the right, the front, and behind him while mumbling “South, east, west.” He reached back down to the keyboard, made a small change, and vanished instantly.

  The guard squinted at the empty space where Todd had been. He was still trying to process what he had just seen when he heard a sound directly behind him. The guard turned just in time to be hit in the face with a metal folding chair.

  The guard lay unconscious on the floor and didn’t hear Todd say, “Look at the bright side. They’ll probably fire you.”

  2.

  Centuries earlier, in Medieval England, it was movie night for the wizards, which was just as confusing as it sounds.

  The wizards were all time travelers, and for many years, they had held to an unwritten rule to not speak too much about their own times. Any two of them could be from times that were up to three decades apart. It was thought that discussion of the changes in society, social mores, and the quality of the various casts of Saturday Night Live would only lead to unnecessary conflict. In fact, the wizards from the mid-1990s or later refused to discuss any movies at all for fear of letting slip any details of the Star Wars prequels or the fourth Indiana Jones, a group of works that the later wizards would only refer to by the collective title The Unpleasantness.

  Later, of course, attitudes grew more lax. Wizards from earlier times wanted to play with more advanced hardware, and wizards from later times wanted to see the looks on their faces when they did, so the system slowly broke down.

  Eventually, the wizards started sharing information freely, even arranging a film festival, during which all three Star Wars prequels and the fourth Indiana Jones movie were all screened back to back, in the name of getting it over with.

  Since then, the wizards of Leadchurch had settled into a nice routine, holding a weekly movie night, taking turns subjecting each other to a double feature of their favorite films (mostly science fiction) and their favorite food (mostly pizza).

  It was Phillip’s turn to host the party, and the guests were having difficulty processing his first selection. As the credits rolled, Phillip stopped his massive Betamax machine and hit rewind.

  “Well, that’s Colossus: The Forbin Project. What do you think?” he asked his friends, who were scattered comfortably around his rec room, their wizard robes unbuttoned to show the T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers they always wore underneath, except for Roy, who was of a different generation. He wore slacks, loafers, and a short-sleeved button-down shirt, but then again, he also wore a trench coat instead of a robe, and he had the only wizard hat with a fedora brim. His staff was what billiards players refer to as a “bridge.
”

  Martin stood up from the chrome and leather couch he had been sharing with Tyler and Jeff. He stretched his back and groaned, “I dunno. It was interesting, but I want to see the sequel before I pass judgment.”

  Phillip smiled. “There was no sequel.”

  Gary, who was slowly unfolding himself after two hours of sitting cross-legged on the floor, asked, “What do you mean, no sequel? Didn’t it do well enough to get a second movie made?”

  Roy shook his head. He was the oldest man in the room in terms of physical age, because he was in his early fifties, and because he was from the year 1973. He also was an aerospace engineer by training and exuded a demeanor of terse, dependable authority. “See, kids, back in Phil’s and my day, if you made a good movie, you took that success and made a different movie, not the same movie over again.”

  Phillip was the second-oldest man in the room. He was in his early forties, from the mid-1980s, and exuded an air of foppish, fallible authority. He smiled broadly and said, “Actually, that was your day. In my day they had started doing the endless sequel thing. This movie was from before, and I don’t think there was ever any plan for a sequel.”

  “But it ended with a cliffhanger,” Tyler said.

  “No, it didn’t,” Phillip explained. “That was the end of the story.”

  “But,” Tyler sputtered, “the supercomputer, whatcha-call-it, Colossus, had completely taken over the world.”

  “Yes,” Phillip agreed.

  “What? What kind of movie is that?” Tyler asked, indignant.

  Phillip chuckled. “A seventies movie. The central message of science fiction was that we were all doomed.”

  Jeff snorted. “The message of the seventies was that we were all doomed.” Jeff was from a time later in the future than anyone else in the room, but he and Roy had hit it off, and Roy had taken Jeff on a field trip to the early 1970s. Jeff returned badly shaken and refused to even discuss going back.