Out of Spite, Out of Mind Read online

  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.

  Magic 2.0: A Partial Explanation

  One night, while exploring a server he probably shouldn’t have been, Martin Banks discovered a file that proved his reality was computer generated. By editing the file, he found that he could perform feats that seemed like magic—things such as flight, teleportation, and time travel. He knew that his newfound power could drastically improve his life, but he’d have to be careful, and avoid drawing attention to himself.

  He did neither of those things. Instead, he immediately messed things up very badly and attracted the attention of government agents.

  Martin fled to Medieval England, a time and place where people believed in magic, and wizards were revered. He reasoned that he could be the most powerful being in the world and live a life of ease and luxury if he showed some restraint, and used his power wisely.

  Once again, he did neither of those things. He immediately messed up very badly, which attracted the attention of several other people who had found the same file, had developed even better powers, and had migrated back in time to live as wizards long before Martin got the idea.

  Among Martin’s new acquaintances were Gwen, the woman he grew to love; Phillip, who became his best friend; and Brit, a woman who had tangled her own timeline so thoroughly that her past self and her future self now uneasily coexisted in Atlantis, a city that her future self had built in the past, and her past self would one day build in her future, which was also the past. One thing all of these wizards shared in common was that they wanted nothing more than to enjoy their lives and not bother anyone.

  They do neither of those things. Instead, they all tend to mess up on a regular basis, and attract the attention of pretty much everybody.

  1.

  Brit the Elder’s house exuded the sort of serenity that’s only possible in a home when nobody’s there to enjoy it. A small amount of light from the outside filtered in through the blinds, partially illuminating an interior that contained just enough furniture, mementos, and objects d’art to qualify as deliberately austere, rather than just empty.

  In the midst of all of this stillness and silence, Brit the Elder materialized. Other magic users would simply pop into existence, or appear after an animation and sound effect intended to impress any witnesses, but which usually just resembled the beaming-in special effect from Star Trek. Brit the Elder had spent a great deal of time perfecting her own materialization macro to be subtle, yet noticeable. The result was that she appeared to slip elegantly into existence, like a silver spoon rising to the surface of a bone-china bowl full of vichyssoise.

  She appeared standing straight and tall, as was her habit. She glanced around to verify that she was alone, following which her entire skeleton seemed to sag, and she said one word.

  “Shit.”

  She said the word slowly, as if it had seven syllables, or she was trying to communicate the concept of shit to someone who spoke a different language.

  Without bothering to turn on any lights, she staggered two steps to a nearby chaise lounge. It was meant to be gracefully lied upon, preferably while reading a design magazine. Instead, Brit the Elder planted her rear end directly in the chaise’s middle and slumped forward as if she were sitting on a park bench holding a plastic bottle of vodka wrapped in a paper bag.

  She often returned from her visits with Brit the Younger feeling a bit wrung out. She disliked confrontations to begin with, and Brit the Younger was almost always angry with her. Brit the Elder found it all particularly upsetting because she had been Brit the Younger, long ago, and watching her younger self lose her temper made Brit the Elder remember those emotions from when she lived them, and she was angry with Brit the Elder, whom she had disliked intensely at the time, and whom she herself now was. The experience usually left her feeling a unique combination of self-directed anger, remorse, confusion, and more self-directed anger coming from the opposite direction.

  It was always bad, but this time it was much worse.

  What’s happening? she thought. What am I going to do?

  Just having those thoughts was enough to make Brit the Elder panic, but she fought it down, forcing herself to breathe slowly and think logically. She fidgeted with her right foot, pressing the tips of her toes against the floor.

  Okay, she thought. Calm down. Think it through. I remember clearly, back when I was Brit the Younger, the wizards in Leadchurch made Kludge an offer that would help his gang work together with them. I remember Kludge turning down the deal Phillip offered him, but Brit the Younger says he took the deal, and she’s Brit the Younger right now, so you’d think the memory’s a lot fresher for her.

  Where does that leave me? For the first time I can recall, something has happened differently from how I remember it happening. How is this possible?

  She could see three options. The two most appealing possibilities were that she had misremembered, or that Brit the Younger was wrong. Either of those options amounted to a mistake on her part; the only difference was when she messed up: when she was Brit the Younger or when she was Brit the Elder. She hated making mistakes, but it was far preferable to the implications of the third possibility: that there was some error in the code.

  The error could be in her code, which might lead to her death. Or, the error could be in the code that generated the entire known universe, which might lead to the destruction of everything. She figured an error was bad news for her either way.

  A fourth option occurred to her, but she liked it even less. It was possible that her memories were not tied to Brit the Younger’s experiences. All of the beliefs that had governed her every action for the last several decades of her life might have been completely misguided, causing her to be a hateful monster to Brit the Younger for no real reason at all.

  Of those options, the easiest to verify was that she had misremembered, so she decided to start with that.

  Brit the Elder rose from the chair and walked from her sleek and modern great room, down a tasteful hall, and into her minimal, functional office and workshop, where a walnut desk supported her computer: an original one-piece Macintosh.

  The computer’s plastic case had long ago faded from its original stylish gray tones to a dingy yellow, not dissimilar to the color of a dehydrated man’s urine. It was a common problem with the plastics used in the cases of the early Macintosh computers. Once, Brit had been amazed that Steve Jobs would allow a product to ship with such an obvious aesthetic flaw, but in time, she realized that Steve Jobs didn’t consider anything that would cause a customer to want to buy a newer computer a flaw.

  Brit the Elder sat down in front of the computer, absentmindedly rubbing the toes of her shoes together as she wiggled the mouse back and forth to rid the screen of flying toasters. She navigated through the file structure, to the folder that held her journals.

  Her many, many journals.

  She had started keeping a daily record of her thoughts, hopes, dreams, and actions when she was a teenager, back when that meant trying to keep track of which member of her current favorite boy band was dreamiest. She found that keeping the journals helped her make sense of a day’s events and organize her thoughts and ideas, so she kept it up, switching later to the computer from the paper notebooks.

  The journals were a daily catalog of her irritating interactions with her future self, but they also held the day-to-day account of every other time traveler she’d met, every major event she’d witnessed, and her feelings about all of them.
There was a weird stretch of nearly a decade when the notes got spotty, but she wasn’t quite to that bit yet. Some of the entries contained notes so detailed that they described people’s actual physical movements and timing information down to the second. It was an invaluable record, and Brit the Elder used it to appear nearly omniscient.

  Reading the labels on the grid of file folders, Brit scanned all the major events of her life: her discovery of the file; her notes from her experiments where she learned how to fly, teleport, time travel, stop the aging process, and do any number of other things that others thought of as magic; her account of when she decided to travel back in time to find Atlantis, or, if Atlantis didn’t exist, build it herself; and the angry screed she wrote when she traveled back, found Atlantis waiting for her, and discovered that the city hadn’t existed until a future version of herself went even farther back in time, built the whole place herself, then waited around for her younger self to arrive.

  She poked through the scores of folders that documented the years she spent as Brit the Younger, living in Atlantis, in the shadow of her future self, who the whole city looked to as a leader simply because she’d gotten there first, even if she had done it much later.

  She’d stopped writing the journals when she became Brit the Elder. She didn’t want Brit the Much Elder reading her thoughts, and was certain that she would, because that’s exactly what she herself was doing to Brit the Younger.

  Of course, she told Brit the Younger that she hadn’t looked at the journals in years. That was the only reason Brit the Younger still kept them. In retrospect, she was more than a little embarrassed that she had believed such an obvious lie when Brit the Elder told it to her, all those decades ago.

  Brit searched through the folder for the current decade, then the year, then the month, and pulled up the MacWrite file for the current day.

  She waited as the antique computer churned through the daunting task of opening a single-page text file.

  Of course, I just misremembered it, she thought. I got caught up helping tend to the wounded from the dragon attack, so I didn’t bother to read the journal this morning. It figures that this’d be one of those rare times when I misremember something. I’ll just double-check; the journal will confirm what Brit the Younger said, and I’ll laugh this off.

  The screen filled with menu headings, a ruler, and Brit’s recollections from this very day, when she’d lived it the first time, more than a hundred years earlier.

  Brit leaned in close to the screen, silently absorbing the words, clicking intermittently to scroll downward. She blinked, rubbed her eyes, and leaned in closer.

  Phillip explained the offer to Kludge. He was resistant. Phillip explained that Kludge and his gang wouldn’t be harmed in any way, but that we would want them to try their hardest to kill us, but Kludge wanted no part of it. We even described the fake, rideable dragons they’d get to use, but his distrust just runs too deep. Maybe someday we’ll win him over, but it won’t be any time soon.

  Brit the Elder leaned back in her chair, staring at the computer’s tiny built-in monitor. She kicked her shoes off as she continued reading, hoping to find something about Kludge changing his mind.

  Just a few minutes ago, the journal continued, Brit the Elder came over. I told her that Kludge had declined the offer. She said she already knew that, that he would come around eventually, and congratulated me on how well my friends and I had handled the situation. She was trying to be nice, but I wish she wouldn’t bother if she doesn’t really mean it.

  Brit the Elder shook her head. Even when I’m nice to her, she assumes it’s insincere, the little snot.

  Her memories matched the historical record, but did not match the events that had actually happened. Back when she was Brit the Younger, she had experienced the event of Kludge refusing Phillip’s offer. She then wrote about Kludge refusing Phillip’s offer in her journal, which proved that it happened the way she remembered it. Except that it appeared that the opposite was true: Kludge accepted the offer, which was not possible. Events had not unfolded in the way that the events had unfolded, which was, of course, a paradox. She could only conclude that either there was something wrong with the program of the universe, or the last hundred years of the journals perfectly matching observed events had been a long series of coincidences. She found one of those answers a lot more likely than the other.

  A glitch is the simplest answer. Of course, glitches can cause further glitches, then cascade failures, then system crashes. Occam’s razor may have just slit the world’s throat.

  Brit the Elder sat frowning, for over a minute, before coming to the decision that this was a problem she couldn’t frown away. She couldn’t rely on her memories, or her notes about what would happen tomorrow. For the first time in a very, very long time, she didn’t know what was about to happen.

  I’m completely in the dark. I don’t know what to do. Well, that’s not true. I have a good idea what the logical next move is; it’s just that being in the dark might be preferable.

  She sat in silence for a moment, trying to puzzle out some simple solution that didn’t involve doing anything she loathed. Bracing herself against the floor with one foot, she drew the other one up into her lap and absentmindedly scratched at her toes. This all seems bad, but what is it so far? One anomaly that only I noticed. It’s probably just some little hiccup. I have no reason to believe anything else is wrong. What is going on with my feet? They don’t itch, exactly, but still . . .

  She looked down at her foot, illuminated by the gray light from the monitor, and let out a small, strangled shriek. She lifted up her right foot to get a better look. At first it looked perfectly normal, but then, without warning, it changed to a crude approximation of a human foot constructed entirely out of triangles the color of her skin. Her foot remained in this unnatural condition for a couple of seconds, then changed back to her ordinary, regular foot.

  She stared at it for a long time, watching it transform back and forth at random between flesh and bone and living polygons. She only looked away when she realized that the toes of her other foot felt odd as well. She lowered her right foot, and lifted and stared at her left foot, seeing that it was doing the same bizarre thing. She slouched down in the chair, gripped the seat base for support, and put both feet up on her desk. She stared at them for a moment, then very slowly, as if the word had fourteen syllables, said, “Shit.”

  2.

  Almost twenty-four hours later, evening was falling over Atlantis like a freshly laundered bedsheet, descending over a bare mattress just before getting its hospital corners tucked in. The citizens walked home after their day’s activities. Merchants either packed up their goods or shouted to anyone who would listen that they were selling them at a loss to keep from having to carry them away.

  The light from the sunset reflected off the silver sequins of Martin’s robe and wizard hat, and the silver bust of Santo on the head of his staff, projecting a million pinpricks of light that danced and bobbed on the walls, the ground, and Gwen, who walked beside him. Her robe and hat were made of a subdued tan material, but caught the eye just as much as Martin’s as they were expertly tailored and draped to Gwen’s petite frame.

  “Why are we walking again?” Martin asked.

  Gwen said, “You know why. We discussed it, and agreed that it was a terrible idea to ever teleport to Gary’s.”

  “We agreed it’s a terrible idea to teleport to Gary’s if he knows we’re coming,” Martin corrected her. “We might as well ask him to set up a nasty surprise for us. And I know that we’re flying from Brit and Phillip’s to Gary’s place. I just don’t understand why you wanted to walk from your place to Brit’s.”

  “Oh. That. For fun.”

  “Fun? We can fly and teleport, and walking across town is your idea of fun?”

  Gwen laughed and took Martin’s arm. “Look arou
nd you! What’s the point of living somewhere beautiful if you always teleport past it, or fly through too quickly to enjoy it?”

  Martin looked at his surroundings and admitted she had a point. One of the advantages to the fact that Atlantis was built inside an immense bowl floating rim-deep in the Mediterranean was that when one looked out, across the bowl, almost the entire city was visible from any one spot. The narrow streets formed concentric rings, growing both larger and higher as they radiated outward, built on the roofs of the buildings along the streets below, like terraces cut into a hillside. This encouraged the sorceresses in charge to make sure that any proposed new building, garden, or pathway met certain aesthetic standards. Martin saw a vista of minimalist glass buildings, beautifully manicured green spaces, and palm trees rustling gently in the Mediterranean breeze, all tinted pink by the distant sunset.

  “Okay, I see your point. But why don’t you ever want to walk anywhere when we’re at my place?”

  “Because your place is in Medieval London. The streets are paved with mud, and people poop out their windows.”

  “The second of those statements sort of contradicts the first. I guess that means you’ll want to live in Atlantis, then.”

  “I live in Atlantis now.”

  “I mean later, when we live together.”

  “We’ve talked about this, Martin. I’m not interested in living together out of wedlock.”

  “I know that, Gwen. That’s not what I’m saying.”

  Gwen stopped walking and stared at him. “Martin Banks, are you asking me to marry you?”

  “Oh, Lord, no!”

  Gwen said nothing.

  Martin said, “Let me rephrase that.”

  Gwen’s eyes narrowed. “Please do.”

  “What I mean is, I wouldn’t propose like this, just casually dropping it in conversation. I’d make a much bigger deal out of it.”