Off to Be the Wizard - 2 - Spell or High Water

by Scott Meyer

  After Murphy finally blew up, it fell to Miller to be the voice of reason.

  “Now, now Murph,” he said. “Losing your temper won’t accomplish anything.”

  Murphy sputtered, “But, but, you . . . you’re always losing your temper.”

  “Yes, but I’m good at it. You’re not. Watch and learn.”

  Miller looked at Jimmy, sitting there at the far end of the warehouse, holding his tin can and peering at them through his telescope.

  Miller held his can up to his mouth, which Jimmy took as a cue to lift his can to his ear. The string pulled tight, and Miller spoke.

  “Jimmy, I speak for both my partner, Agent Murphy, and myself when I say that we both deeply regret his outburst.”

  “I’m certain you do,” Jimmy said, magnanimously.

  “Yes. It wasn’t nearly harsh enough.”

  With that, Agent Miller threw open the valve on a fire hose of profanities delivered at top volume, and with the occasional hint of vibrato that is the mark of a true virtuoso. Jimmy took the can away from his ear, then put it back, because due to the volume of Miller’s voice, and the acoustic qualities of the warehouse, the obscenities were actually quieter through the can.

  When Agent Miller had finally run through the entire Urban Dictionary, and good portions of the thesaurus, and a rhyming dictionary, the torrent finally petered out.

  Through the tin can Jimmy heard Agent Miller say, in a quiet voice heavy with menace, “Now you look, Jimmy. My partner Murph has shown the patience of a saint. He’s doing the best he can to follow those ridiculous directions, so you need to cool your jets, or I’m going to come over there and the last thing you’ll ever hear will be my tinny laughter as I strangle you with your own soup-can telephone.”

  “Actually,” Jimmy said, “if the string was pulled tight around my neck, the sound vibrations wouldn’t carry through the string.” There was a long silence, then Jimmy added, “I apologize. Correcting you then was probably not the smart move. I know that working with me has not been pleasant for either of you, and that so far there’s been nothing to show for it, but I tell you, we’re very close to our goal.”

  Jimmy took the silence as encouragement and continued. “It’s just these instructions of Todd’s. It’s been years since he’s done the things he’s telling us to do, and, well, as Agent Murphy told you, Todd’s not the brightest man. He’s shrewd enough to be dangerous to others, but dumb enough to be even more of a danger to himself.”

  Miller finally broke his silence to ask, “So, do you think this is going to work or not, Jimmy?”

  Jimmy said, “We are going to find the file, and when we do, I will prove that everything I’ve told you is true, but it’s going to be a frustrating process. I promise, I’ll be more patient. Please give Agent Murphy my apologies.”

  The three men got back to work. Jimmy deciphered Todd’s instructions, and watched through his telescope as Agent Murphy attempted to follow them. Finally, they wound their way around the Internet and onto some sort of massive corporate database. Jimmy could tell from the address that it belonged to a large gaming company. After several more nonsensical blind alleys, they were looking at a directory with one file in it, a file called repository1-c.txt.

  Jimmy told Murphy to open the file remotely using the terminal, as they had tried several times before. Unlike all of the other times, this time the file opened.

  Jimmy said, “Okay, gentlemen. Here comes your proof. Do a search for my full name, James Isadore Sadler.”

  Agent Miller’s voice came back through the tin can. “It’s searching. How long will this take?”

  “Usually about twenty minutes, but it depends on the speed of the server we’re accessing.”

  Nine minutes later, the search returned a single match. Jimmy silently thanked his parents for giving him a ridiculous middle name, then instructed Murphy to pull up the entry that Jimmy knew defined him as a person. Jimmy didn’t need to work very hard to remember which number they were looking for. He had rehearsed this moment thousands of times in his mind. He led Agent Murphy to a specific set of digits, and instructed him to read them aloud.

  Murphy took the can from Miller. His tinny voice said, “It says five, zero, zero.”

  Yeesh, Phillip, Jimmy thought. That’s overkill.

  Jimmy put the can to his mouth and said, “Change that to twelve.”

  “Twelve?”

  “Yes. Twelve.”

  Murphy hesitated. “What’ll this do?”

  Jimmy tried to sound calm as he explained, “If I’ve been telling you the truth, it’ll reset my magnetic field so I can use electronics again.”

  “And if you’re not telling the truth?”

  “Nothing,” Jimmy said. “I mean, it’s just some random file some game company is holding onto, right? If I’m lying, the worst that can happen is it’ll break some game and they’ll have to restore a backed-up copy of the file. Besides, the file has my name in it, right? So this is my entry, and I’m having you adjust the number down, not up, so I can’t possibly be stealing anything, can I?”

  That seemed to satisfy Murphy. Jimmy couldn’t hear the clicking, but he watched through the telescope as Murphy made the change. Jimmy sat for a moment, concentrating on enjoying the moment. Eventually, Agent Miller yelled, “Hey, what next?” from the far end of the warehouse.

  Jimmy stood up, straightened his rumpled, secondhand suit jacket, and walked toward the agents, never taking his eyes off of the computer monitor. He walked at a normal pace, but to him it felt agonizingly slow. With each step, the screen got closer, and with each step he became more certain that at any second it would flicker and go dead. He kept walking like that, each step expecting the screen to die, until he couldn’t walk any further without kicking the table on which the computer sat. Miller and Murphy both looked shocked, but Jimmy didn’t know it. He couldn’t take his eyes off of the screen. It was the first time he’d seen a video display of any kind from closer than fifteen feet in thirty years, and it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

  Murphy muttered several obscenities. Miller said, “Okay, so he can stand next to a computer. What’s that prove?”

  Jimmy said, “It proves I was telling the truth.”

  “Not about everything,” Agent Miller said. “We didn’t arrest the Banks kid for standing next to computers, we arrested him for producing money out of nothing. Frankly, I’m still not convinced this whole magnetic field thing hasn’t been a trick from day one.”

  Agent Murphy rolled his eyes. “Miller, how could he possibly fake that?”

  “If I could tell you that, it wouldn’t be much of a trick.”

  Jimmy expected this. Circumstances had forced him to prove that what he was saying was true, but proof, as is often the case, wasn’t very convincing. Luckily for Jimmy, he was convincing, even when he had no proof.

  Jimmy smiled and said, “Agent Miller has a valid point. None of the people you’ve been pursuing were wanted for damaging electronics. I can show you how all of the other things were done, but it will take a little time.”

  Agent Miller laughed contemptuously, and said, “Yeah, I knew it. How long will it take, Jimmy? How much longer are you going to string us along?”

  Jimmy said, “About fifteen minutes.” He walked lightly over to the camper and grabbed one of the folding lawn chairs they’d been using to augment the warehouse’s furnishings. He brought it back to the table and plunked it down in front of the keyboard. “In the meantime,” he said, “you gentlemen might want to turn on your cell phones and check your voicemail, since you can now.”

  Jimmy ran a search on the file for Agent Miller’s full name. While it ran, he pulled up the text editor and started typing out strings of code, largely from memory. Agent Murphy asked what he was doing, and Jimmy explained that he was writing a quick script that would automat
e the process of accessing the file in the future, so they wouldn’t have to repeat the whole process they’d just been through. There was a lot that Agent Murphy didn’t understand about computers, but neither he nor Miller wanted to go through all of that rigmarole ever again, so they let him proceed.

  Jimmy checked on the search, and found that it had returned four people with the same full name as Agent Miller. He got the agent’s birthdate, and that allowed him to narrow it down to one.

  “Okay, gentlemen, for my next trick: Agent Miller, I’ll need you to tell me your current checking account balance, down to the penny.”

  Miller shook his head. “If you think I’m going to give you my checking account number, you’re crazy.”

  “I didn’t ask for your checking account number,” Jimmy said, “just the balance, as I said, down to the penny.”

  Miller didn’t know his balance, but he was able to call the phone number on the back of his debit card to find out. He carefully guarded his keypad as he entered the number on his debit card, but he needn’t have bothered. Jimmy was occupied, putting the finishing touches on his script.

  After navigating a phone tree, shouting at a phone tree that he didn’t want to open a new line of credit, talking to a human, then shouting at the human that he didn’t want to open a new line of credit, he got the number he’d wanted.

  “Okay, my checking balance is $3,762.43”

  Jimmy said, “Splendid. Now please hang up the phone.”

  Jimmy did a quick search, typed few characters, then told Agent Miller, “Now call again and ask for your balance.”

  “What? Aw, man, I had them on the phone. I could have just asked the guy to double-check it. Now I have to go through the whole phone tree again.”

  Jimmy said, “Please, just call again.”

  Miller had murder in his eyes, but he made the call, climbed the phone tree, and refused the credit line. Jimmy and Murphy watched with growing anticipation as he got closer and closer to his bank balance. Miller said, “Okay, for bank balance, it says to press one.” He’d opted to stick with the computer tree for this run, since it aggravated him automatically and impersonally, while the human had done so deliberately for his own enjoyment. He looked at his phone, pressed one, put the phone back up to his ear, and immediately went white as a sheet. He looked at his phone, pressed one again, and held it back to his ear a second time.

  “What is it?” Murphy asked. “What does it say?”

  Jimmy looked at the computer screen, and said, “It says that his balance is $5,003,762.43, doesn’t it, Agent Miller?”

  “What did you do?!” Agent Miller shouted.

  “Exactly what I said I would.”

  “Whose money is it?”

  Jimmy shrugged. “It’s in your account. I’d say it’s yours.”

  Miller stood up, towering over Jimmy and bellowing down at him. “Don’t you give me that! Who did you take it from?”

  “Nobody,” Jimmy said. “How could I have? All I did was type a number into the file. You’ve been sitting right here, and Murphy’s been watching me like a hawk the whole time. I haven’t pulled up any other systems, or accessed any other files. I haven’t even contacted your bank. I’ve been typing away in a text editor the whole time.”

  “You better be able to take it back! Now!” Miller’s face was beet red. Spittle rained down on Jimmy.

  “I will. But, first, a little credit please. I’ve lived up to my end here. I told you I’d show you how Martin and all the others got their money, and I have.”

  “By making me a criminal?”

  “I can change it back if that’s what you really want, but gentlemen, tell me, is this embezzling? Have we broken the law? We didn’t take the money from anywhere. We didn’t deprive anyone of anything. Are there laws against altering reality at a fundamental level?”

  Miller shouted, “You haven’t altered reality! I’m not stupid. All you altered was a bank record.”

  “By changing a plain text file that has nothing to do with online banking, on a server that belongs to a gaming company?” Jimmy asked, calmly.

  “Don’t give me that,” Miller said. “I don’t care where this stupid file of yours is. It’s computers. They’re all tied in together these days. You and your buddies just found a back door or something. That’s all.”

  Jimmy’s smile remained in place, but it did become a bit less genuine looking. “Okay, Agent Miller, say that’s true. What about my magnetic field, then?”

  “It’s a trick!” Miller whined. He turned to his partner. “Murph, you’ve gotta see that this is some kind of trick!”

  Jimmy turned to Murphy asked said, “How? How could I have made any integrated circuit that got within fifteen feet of me stop working?”

  Agent Murphy asked Agent Miller, “That’s a good point. How did he do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Agent Miller cried. “Maybe he keistered an electromagnet!”

  Jimmy said, “Really now, how likely does that sound?”

  “A lot more likely that you getting God-like powers out of a government-issue Dell.”

  They both turned to Murphy, who had somehow assumed the role of judge in their group dynamic. Murphy thought for a while, then said in an even tone, “I’m sorry. I just don’t buy it. If he’d keistered an electromagnet, he’d have stuck to the side of the boxcar.”

  Jimmy put up his hands and said, “Look. This is a lot to take in, I understand. And you’re right that all you’ve seen me do is change a number on this computer and have it change a number on another computer. I can show you the fancier stuff.”

  Miller bared his teeth and said, “I think you’d better do that then.”

  Jimmy said, “Okay.” He turned to the computer and typed in a command.

  At first, nothing happened. Then, more nothing happened. Agent Miller scowled. Jimmy held up a finger and said, “I’m sorry, one second.” He turned back to the computer, looked at the script he’d been writing, muttering to himself. The two agents shared a look that would not have made Jimmy feel safe.

  Jimmy said, “Ah, there it is. I tell you, you miss one slash . . .”

  He stood up again, and said, “Sorry about that, guys. It should work this time.” He typed the command, hit enter, and disappeared.

  The two agents blinked in disbelief. They looked at the space where Jimmy had stood, then they looked at each other, then they looked around the warehouse to see where Jimmy had gone.

  They didn’t see him anywhere.

  Murphy quickly turned to the computer. Miller saw his partner’s head turn and followed suit, just in time to see the screen go black. He looked at Murphy, whose face had gone white.

  “What happened?”

  Murphy said, “The last thing I saw was ‘reformat C drive.’”

  “What’s that mean?”

  A distant voice shouted, “It means the memory has been erased.”

  The agents looked to the chair and telescope at the far end of the warehouse, and saw Jimmy, wearing a beautifully tailored suit. He had shaved, gotten a haircut, and was holding a tablet computer. “Of course,” Jimmy continued, “a good data recovery specialist could get it all back, but by then I’ll have password protected the file anyway, so there’s really no point.”

  Jimmy reached down to the chair, picked up the notebook that contained Todd’s instructions, and said, “Just came back for this. Thanks for your assistance, gentlemen.”

  The two agents started running as fast as they could toward Jimmy, who said, “Keep the five million. Consider it a tip. You can use it to pay for anger management classes.”

  Jimmy poked at the tablet screen and disappeared.

  24.

  Louiza had been a surgeon in Sao Paulo before getting sidetracked into the medical technology field, then eventually finding the file and emigrating
to Atlantis. When people arrived in the past, they eventually realized that they still had to do something, and what the people who already lived in the past were doing, such as struggling to find food and shelter, was not in their case necessary, nor was it fun. Most time travelers ended up doing pretty much the same thing they did in their original time, and for Louiza, that meant setting up a medical clinic. It passed the time, she was helping the community, and it allowed her to explore the medical applications of the file.

  Her facilities were beautiful, clean, and modern. Her waiting room was comfortable, spacious, and attractive, and her receptionist was a large, muscular man who knew how to look at her in just the perfect way to put butterflies in her stomach.

  He was sitting at his desk filing his fingernails when Phillip and Brit materialized in the waiting room. Brit was clearly in great distress, and Phillip was holding Nik, who had an arrow sticking out of his side.

  Brit shouted, “We need Louiza, now!”

  The receptionist scarcely had time to stand before Martin and Gwen appeared. Martin immediately helped Phillip support Nik, who was moaning and clutching at the arrow. Martin could see that Nik also had deep cuts on his arms.

  The receptionist hit a button which was not technically connected to anything, but which still alerted Louiza whenever it was pressed.

  Martin asked, “What happened?!”

  Brit answered, “We were being silly and Nik was dragging me out of the apartment. As soon as we got out the door, a bunch of arrows flew at me from both ends of the hall.”

  Gwen said, “And poor Nik got in the way.”

  “No,” Brit said. “They bounced off me and hit him.”

  Louiza materialized. She took a second to survey the scene then leapt into action. Within moments she and her receptionist had Nik on a gurney that hovered in midair and whisked him away to the examination rooms. They instructed the others to remain in the waiting room. Five minutes later, Louiza came out to tell them what was happening.