Off to Be the Wizard Read online

  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, loude
r 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.

  Chapter 6.

  They took my phone, Martin thought. It never occurred to me that if I got into trouble they would take my phone.

  Martin sat alone in an interrogation room that looked like it could have been made by the set designer from a bad TV show. The only thing that saved it from being a total cliché was that if this were a set, the chairs would look cooler. They’d be stainless steel or something. Instead he sat on a beat-up wooden chair that was probably older than he was. He was still wearing his weekend uniform: baggy cargo pants, faded polo shirt, and sneakers, although they had confiscated his belt and his shoelaces. Again, cliché.

  The two men had introduced themselves as Special Agents Miller and Murphy, told Martin
he was under arrest, cuffed him, and stuck him in their unmarked car, which Martin didn’t mention was parked illegally. The ride to the station was horrible. Martin figured being under arrest and riding to the police station would always be horrible, but in his case it was worse than usual. He knew he could easily escape. All he had to do was get his phone out of his pocket, open the app, hit the button and he’d be at home. He’d be handcuffed, but still, one problem at a time. He considered fleeing for a moment, but chose against it. Martin knew what he had done, and he knew it would be very difficult to prove, or even explain without sounding crazy. If, however, he disappeared from the back seat of a police car, that would be easy to explain.

  We arrested him. We put him in the car. He escaped.

  Martin figured that the method of escape would be seen as a minor detail, unless they somehow figured it out, in which case Martin suspected he’d spend several months answering questions and the rest of his life regretting the answers he’d given.

  So Martin decided to bide his time, and was pretty happy with that decision right up until they booked him. The first step of the booking procedure was to remove his handcuffs, which he’d liked. The second step was for him to empty his pockets, and that was when Martin knew he was doomed. As reluctant as a man walking to the gallows, he handed over his wallet, his keys, and his phone. The rest of the booking procedure was a blur. Then they’d put him in a holding cell and let him sit there for about an hour. Now he was in the interrogation room.

  Special agents Miller and Murphy came in and sat across the table from Martin. Miller was tall and muscular, with a receding hairline. Murphy was average height and doughy, with unruly brown hair. They both looked happy. Miller silently read papers in a manila folder with Martin’s name written theatrically on the tab. Murphy placed a plastic bag on the table. The bag held Martin’s shoelaces, belt, and the contents of his pockets. Martin could see the corner of his phone there next to his wallet. It was torture. Freedom was right there, and he couldn’t reach it.