Off to Be the Wizard Read online

  Off to Be the Wizard

  By Scott Meyer

  Copyright 2013 Scott Meyer

  Smashwords Edition

  Rocket Hat Industries

  rockethatindustries.com

  Cover image by Scott Meyer

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any similarities to any actual persons, living or dead, are coincidental.

  Off to Be the Wizard

  Scott Meyer

  Contents

  Chapter 1.

  Chapter 2.

  Chapter 3.

  Chapter 4.

  Chapter 5.

  Chapter 6.

  Chapter 7.

  Chapter 8.

  Chapter 9.

  Chapter 10.

  Chapter 11.

  Chapter 12.

  Chapter 13.

  Chapter 14.

  Chapter 15.

  Chapter 16.

  Chapter 17.

  Chapter 18.

  Chapter 19.

  Chapter 20.

  Chapter 21.

  Chapter 22.

  Chapter 23.

  Chapter 24.

  Chapter 25.

  Chapter 26.

  Chapter 27.

  Chapter 28.

  Chapter 29.

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Scott Meyer

  The following is intended to be a fun, comedic sci-fi/fantasy novel. Any similarity between the events described and how reality actually works is purely coincidental.

  Chapter 1.

  Terror.

  Martin Banks enjoyed science. As a child he read about people who made huge, world-changing discoveries, and he wondered what emotions he would feel if he ever discovered something really earth-shattering. Now he had made just such a discovery, and he was surprised to find that the answer was absolute bowel-loosening terror.

  Martin didn’t consider himself a hacker. He didn’t like the attitude that the label implied. Sure, as a teenager he’d experimented with the whole pose, but found that rebelling against everything all the time was just too exhausting. It was like an emotional treadmill. It never ended and never got you anywhere, because when you live in a state of constant open rebellion, the powers that be disregard you. So, Martin decided that he wasn’t a hacker. He was just a guy who really liked monkeying with computers.

  Martin was spending the evening his usual way, poking around the internet, seeing what he could get away with. The TV droned away in the background, providing ambient light, occasional distraction, and the illusion of human contact. He knew that many of the things he was doing were technically illegal, but he kept his tampering strictly harmless. That way, the authorities wouldn’t bother with him as long as actual perpetrators were roaming free. He told himself that. He was too smart to really believe it. That didn’t stop him from waking up his computer every evening and seeing what he could see.

  This night he was poking around the servers of a cellphone manufacturer that had been in business since the 1930s, when they made AM radios the size of a post box. He hadn’t done anything particularly bad. He didn’t have to force his way in. Anyone with a working knowledge of network structure and a willingness to look at a tremendous amount of stupefyingly boring information could have found the file.

  It was the kind of file nobody would ever look at. Five terabytes of plain ascii text characters. Even its name made Martin sleepy—repository1-c.txt. The moment that Martin thought, No sane person would download a file like that, was the moment he decided to give it a try.

  He figured it would take a long time to download, which would give him an excuse to knock off early and see what was in his Netflix queue. He was stunned when, instead of a download dialog box, the file leapt open immediately. Instead of downloading the file to his computer, he was somehow accessing it directly. It appeared to be an endless series of huge, discrete blocks of data. The individual chunks were massive tangles of numbers tossed with rare pieces of recognizable text. He might have disregarded the file entirely if not for the fact that many of the numbers appeared to be changing constantly. He double checked. This was his default text editor, and it hadn’t, as far as he knew, been updated to allow this sort of thing. But, there it was.

  The first thing Martin always did when he found some new data file was to search for his own name. It may seem egocentric, but Martin wasn’t worried about that. He had spent a lot of time thinking about himself, and had come to the conclusion that he was definitely not self-absorbed. He hit control-F, typed in “Martin Kenneth Banks,” and hit enter. Usually a word search on a simple text file took no time at all. Plain text is easy for a computer to work with. Due to the sheer size of the file, Martin’s search for himself took nearly ten minutes. It finally found his name lodged toward the back of the file.

  He spent over an hour peering at the data, and eventually was able to tease out some recognizable information. Whoever made this file knew a lot about him. He was irritated to find his height was wrong. It wasn’t labeled Height—it was just the number. But it was unmistakable. Five feet, eleven inches. It was wrong in that while that might be how tall Martin was if you went to the trouble to measure him, he‘d been putting six feet two inches on every form he’d filled out since high school. He edited the number, and hit save. He spent a few moments looking around at various numbers in the file, then got up to go to the bathroom.

  Martin stretched his arms, stood up quickly, and felt a terrible discomfort in his groin. It was like someone had grabbed the waistband of his jeans and pulled upward. These were his favorite jeans. They’d always been a little tight (he liked pants that constantly reminded you that you were wearing pants), but they never caused him anything like this sort of discomfort. He looked down at his waist. His belt was right where it usually sat, but the inseam of the jeans was definitely riding higher than usual. Also, now that he looked, the hems were slightly higher on his ankles than he’d remembered.

  Weird, he thought, as he pulled his pants down a bit and walked into the bathroom. While absentmindedly taking a leak, he glanced over at the mirrored front of the medicine cabinet. He saw dust building up on top of the medicine cabinet and thought that he should really clean up there. He didn’t dust that spot often, because he couldn’t see up there. He stared at the dust, letting that thought sink in until he realized his aim had drifted and he was urinating on the wall.

  The whole time he was cleaning the wall behind the toilet he was laughing at himself. When he was a kid, occasionally he’d have to leave the house at night to fetch something from the car for his parents. He would always think about how weird it would be if some horrible monster was chasing him, and by the time he returned to the safety of the house he would be in a dead sprint with his stomach tied in knots. Then he would laugh, because it was ridiculous to think that a monster would be chasing him in his front yard on a well-lit street in the suburbs. This, he knew, was no different. His pants rode up. It probably meant he was gaining weight. Not a good thing, but nothing to freak out about. And the medicine cabinet probably settled a bit, or one of its support screws had torn free of the drywall, or maybe he was imagining the whole thing. Sitting around all night in a dark apartment with the TV and computer screens providing all the ambient light is bound to affect your perception after a while.

  When the wall was as clean as it was going to get, he turned his attention to the medicine cabinet. It was still fastened firmly to the wall, and didn’t appear to have
moved. He could still see the dust-covered top, and furthermore, he was pretty sure he had always been able to look himself in the eye when he looked at the cabinet’s mirrored front. He remembered the mirror cutting him off about half way through his eyebrows. He was looking in the mirror now, and all he could see was his nose. He looked at his feet again to reassure himself that he was barefoot. Then he just stood there, being confused.

  Finally, Martin left the bathroom. He turned on every light in the apartment. He walked out to the living room/kitchen/dining room of the apartment. It was all one space, but you could tell the kitchen was a different room, because there were appliances in it. You could recognize the dining room because there was a cheap chandelier hanging from the ceiling over the spot where the architect clearly wanted Martin to put a table and chairs. Instead, the chandelier hung at eye level in empty space behind Martin’s desk chair. Martin scanned the room and told himself that he’d always been able to see the top of the refrigerator, and that he was only noticing it now because it was so dusty.

  Enough of this, Martin thought. He went to the bedroom closet to dig through his toolbox. When he moved out of his parents’ house, his uncle Ray had volunteered to drive the rental truck. While watching Martin and his friends carrying Martin’s belongings from his comfortable seat in the air conditioned cab, Uncle Ray noticed that Martin owned no tools. Martin pointed out that he’d never needed to buy tools because he’d lived with his father, who already had them. Martin also pointed out that Uncle Ray sitting in the cab with the engine running and the air conditioning cranked up was costing Martin a fortune in gas. Uncle Ray said that that was fine, and that it didn’t bother him. Later, Uncle Ray gave him a fairly well stocked tool set as a housewarming gift. The tool set came in its own toolbox. Martin pointed out that the toolbox was pink, and said Her First Tool Kit in sparkly letters. Uncle Ray said that this also was fine, and didn’t bother him. Good old Uncle Ray. That guy was unflappable.

  Martin returned from the closet with a pink measuring tape and a tiny pink plastic carpenter’s square. He grabbed a pencil and stood with his back to the jamb of the bedroom door. He placed the carpenter’s square on his head and carefully made a mark where the square met the wall. Martin smirked at himself for wasting his time like this as he ran the tape measure up the wall to the mark. He leaned in close to read the measuring tape.

  The mark met the tape just a touch above the six feet, two inches mark.

  He repeated the process and got the same result.

  He thought, Clearly I’ve gradually grown three inches over the course of the last few years, and only noticed it now, right after changing my height in a weird text file I found online. That’s normal.

  Martin sat at his computer and looked at the file while he thought. He wanted to just start changing things to show himself how silly he was being, but he also wanted to close the file and pretend he’d never found it, so he just sat there. After twenty minutes of this he decided he had to prove once and for all that he was being stupid. The cursor was still at the same place he’d left it, at the height notation. Martin edited six feet two inches to read six feet one inch.

  He walked back to the bedroom door. He stood straight and tall with his back against the door jamb. He carefully placed the square on his head and marked its location with the pencil. He methodically ran the tape measure up the wall, taking care to make sure it was plumb, and noted with great interest that his height now measured six feet one inch tall.

  He measured himself again. Five times. He’d have tried a sixth time, but his hands were shaking too badly to make a legible mark.

  He sat and stared at the TV for about an hour. He had no idea what was on, and didn’t care. He walked back to his computer, re-edited his height to five feet eleven inches and closed the file. He went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face.

  He looked himself in the eye in the medicine cabinet mirror.

  He went to bed. Not to sleep. To bed. Every light in the apartment was still on, as were his clothes. He lay there and thought about the implications of what had just happened, and that was when he felt the terror. Everyone who paid any attention to science fiction, or for that matter to science, eventually came across the concept that reality as we knew it was a computer program. That people were subroutines. That we weren’t biological organisms clinging to a ball of rock hurling around a ball of fire suspended in a sea of nothing, but that we were simulated organisms attached to a virtual ball of rock, located in an unfathomable program that could be a game, a weather simulation, or even a screensaver.

  Well, not a screensaver, Martin thought. Any society advanced enough to produce a program this sophisticated would have long since developed a monitor that didn’t burn in.

  Once Martin’s mental state downgraded from terror to severe agitation, he saw the irony of the situation. Since the beginning of recorded time, man had debated the nature of existence. The greatest thinkers spent their entire lives wrestling with fundamental questions. Even basic discoveries like the wheel and the lever had made profound differences in mankind’s existence. Now Martin had proof of exactly what we were, and the means to change things instantly, with almost no effort. Martin had, with one accidental discovery, become the most important figure in human history, and he desperately wished he could take it all back.

  Martin looked at the clock. It was 3 a.m. He’d been laying there, staring at the ceiling and staving off panic, for six hours. He got up, downed two sleeping pills with a double shot of bourbon, turned off the lights and eventually lost consciousness.

  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 cons
cience. 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.