Off to Be the Wizard

by Scott Meyer

  “He didn’t say he disabled the file, just the shell.”

  “Yeah … it’s really … hard to … cut someone … off from the … file. We … can … do it, … but it takes … a lot of doing! … You can’t rush it.”

  Martin didn’t say anything; he just dug out the silver imp box and showed it to Phillip. Phillip looked puzzled for a moment, then started screaming, “DO IT! DO IT NOW! DO IT!”

  Martin flipped the lid of the box open. The smartphone’s screen glowed invitingly. He pulled up the app and looked at the options. He could go back to his own time, and be arrested like a civilized person. No thanks. He could teleport himself away and watch from a distance as his friends got beaten to death. Not much better. That left one option. He pressed the hover button, and immediately bobbed two feet into the air. He heard a ragged cheer come up from the other wizards, but he was more concerned with the bone-jarring vibration he’d never bothered to fix. Also, with his feet no longer touching the ground, he was quickly losing speed. Phillip must have noticed this too, because he grabbed Martin’s sleeve and started pulling him through the air behind him.

  “Okaay,” Martin said, sounding like a goat sitting on a paint shaker. “I provvved it wwworksss. I’mmm gonnna ssstop n-n-now.”

  Phillip yelled, “Don’t you dare! I’ve got an idea!” He maneuvered Martin’s vibrating body so that he was skimming along two feet above the ground, head first and face down like Superman. Martin was wondering what Phillip had in mind when he felt Phillip jump into the air and land with his knee in the middle of Martin’s back. Martin let out a pained yell as Phillip started kicking the ground, propelling them forward, riding Martin like a scooter. Martin started to complain, but Phillip cut him off, saying, “P-p-pipe downnn. Youuu ooowe meee onnne!”

  “Okaaay! Whooo elssse hasss a p-p-pocket commmputerrr thaaat caan accesss the reeposssitorrry fiiile?” Phillip yelled. A disappointingly small number of voices answered. Martin couldn’t be sure, but he thought he heard three. Gwen and Jeff were two of them.

  “Rrright,” Phillip said, “weee neeed aaaa divvverrrsion! Ideasss?”

  An endless moment passed, then Jeff said, “You know what? I think I got somethin’! I gotta stop running to do this. Keep going, no matter what happens to me!”

  Gary yelled, “Done!” All who knew him realized that this was what passed for an expression of concern from him.

  Martin was still being used as a hoverboard. He hung his head down so that he could have an unobstructed but inverted view behind them. He saw that the wizards had opened a lead of about a hundred feet. He could also see that Jeff had stopped running, and turned to face the groaning, limping mass of Orcs. His head was bowed, and he was clearly operating some sort of electronic device, but Martin couldn’t see what it was. As the Orcs closed the gap, Jeff raised his eyes to meet them. They were about thirty feet away when he made the final key press.

  Martin could hardly see the Orcs. His view was obstructed by a massive army of demons. They were ten feet tall with pinkish-red skin on their top halves. Their legs were brown fur, and ended in cloven hooves. Their snarling, animalistic faces were framed by large curled horns. Their fists glowed green with arcane energy. There were hundreds of them, standing between Jeff and the Orcs, lined up like hellish Rockettes. In the gaps between the demons’ arms and legs, Martin could see just enough to get a sense of the panic in the Orc ranks. One instant they were jogging toward the wizards, the next they were sprinting away. They continued to grumble, but much more emphatically.

  It struck Martin as odd that the demons were facing the wizards, with their backs to the Orcs, but he was willing to accept that. The wizards did not need to be told to stop running. They stood in the tall grass a few hundred feet from the tree line, gasping for air and clutching their sides. Phillip lifted his knee from Martin’s back. Martin vibro-floated a few feet while he poked at his smartphone, then he dropped to the ground and lay there, grateful to be alive and stationary. After a moment he got up and joined the other wizards, who were watching Jeff’s demon army chase off the Orcs.

  Martin watched the battle as he walked around the back of the clutch of wizards. Now that he was standing upright, the demons looked familiar. It helped that they still appeared to be facing Martin, even as they chased the Orcs back to Camelot. Martin wondered why they were running backwards, but then he realized that some of them were running sideways, and that they were all moving in an odd, herky-jerky manner. Martin smiled, then moved ten feet to his left, still watching the demons. They all rotated to face him no matter where he was, like animated cardboard cutouts of demons. Martin laughed, then yelled, “Jeff, Doom?”

  “Yup!” Jeff replied. “They’re called Barons of Hell. They were level bosses from the first game. They showed up again in Doom II, I think. I don’t have all the frames imported or the sounds. I didn’t think I’d need ‘em yet.” Jeff turned to Gary. “I was gonna give you one as a pet for Christmas.”

  One of the Magnuses from Norway said, “I will buy ten. Name your price.”

  The demons didn’t run very fast, but neither did the Orcs. Jeff had time to enact a few more subroutines, enabling the demons to turn sideways, and to throw green fireballs, which seemed to enable the Orcs to run faster. A few Orcs were hit in the back by fireballs, and were too scared to even notice that the fireballs had no effect. The terrified Orcs crowded through a side portal in the city wall like five hundred Three Stooges, slamming a portcullis down behind them. “Can you make more of those?” Gwen asked.

  “How many you want?”

  “Enough to make sure the Orcs stay inside for a while.”

  “Sure,” Jeff said. “The hard part was writin’ an emulator so the game’s code would run out here. Now that I’ve done that, I can make as many as we need. They’ll just wander around, attacking anything that moves.” Jeff hit a few buttons, did some thumb typing and suddenly the field was full of Barons of Hell, wandering about and throwing green fireballs at random. The only sound was the chirping of birds and the wind rustling the trees.

  “Like I said, I haven’t imported the sound files yet,” Jeff explained.

  “Clearly, Jimmy didn’t stick around to watch his Orcs dispatch us, or else he’d have retaliated by now,” David, the wizard from Russia, said as a demon punched him ineffectually in the back of the head.

  “Agreed,” Phillip said, his back aglow in pixelated green fire from repeated fireball strikes. “We need to get back into the city.”

  Martin looked at his smartphone, wedged into its decorative box. Two demons were standing on either side of him, silently struggling to kill each other through him as if he weren’t there. “I can transport myself in there, no problem, but I’ve never tried to take another person with me, let alone twenty.”

  Gwen pulled out a smartphone as a demon walked through her, possibly attempting to kick her. Martin assumed from the phone’s shape and the logo that it was an iPhone 6. She squinted at the screen, saying, “I can transport anyone with this, but I don’t have a UI, just the raw file. I’ll have to do it one person at a time, and I’ll need the hard coordinates of the exact landing spot. Anybody have some safe coordinates inside the city memorized?”

  After a conspicuous silence, Eddie looked at her phone, noticing the logo on the back. “Apple? They’re still in business?”

  Jeff said, “You’re from the early nineties, aren’t you?” Jeff’s portable, from just a few years after Martin’s time, appeared to be two sheets of glass glued together into a rectangle. The back sheet of glass was opaque, the front held the display. Martin didn’t see a logo, which probably meant it wasn’t made by Apple.

  One of the Germans had a Palm Treo that looked like it was designed by a committee of lowest bidders. Martin didn’t think it would be as much use as Gwen’s iPhone.

  By this time, the wizards had formed into a lo
ose huddle, and the demons had surrounded them, and were pelting their backs with a constant barrage of 16-bit fireballs, illuminating the wizards’ faces with an eerie green light.

  “Okay,” Phillip said. “Martin, get in there and keep Jimmy occupied. I doubt he’ll ghost you, at least not right away. He’ll want to play with you, maybe turn you to his side. Try to get him talking. Whatever you do, try to do it in public. Jimmy wants people to think he’s a hero, so he won’t do anything too underhanded if people are watching. I know the coordinates to my shop by heart. Transporting a car one piece at a time takes a lot of trips. Jeff, Gwen, and Felix will send us all there one by one, and we can use my computer to figure out the coordinates and do a group transport to come help you.”

  “Your computer is a Commodore 64. I don’t think the help will come very fast,” Martin said.

  “Hey, don’t knock it. I could have a VIC-20.”

  A mournful voice from the back of the pack said, “Hey! I love my VIC-20!”

  Phillip continued, “You up for this?”

  “Why not?” Martin answered. “What’s the worst that can happen?”

  “He could kill you.”

  “See, that’s noth … wait. What?”

  “He could totally kill you,” Phillip reiterated. “There’s a spell that would take you out instantly. The only challenge for Jimmy would be remembering the right words.”

  “Oh yeah,” Tyler said. “If you don’t use a spell that often, the words just go bye-bye.”

  Gary said, “Yeah, but if it’s something as important as killing Martin, I’m sure Jimmy’d have the words written down.”

  “Obviously,” Jeff agreed.

  “Phillip, why didn’t you tell me there was a spell to kill people?” Martin sputtered.

  “If you were me, and you were training you, would you tell you that you could easily kill you at will?”

  Martin asked after a moment, “You, meaning me, or you meaning you?”

  “Either way,” Phillip answered.

  Martin asked, “Why am I doing this again?”

  Gwen put her hand on Martin’s arm and looked him in the eye, calming him instantly. “Martin, when he finds out the Orcs failed to kill us, he’ll probably just do the job with the shell, and we won’t be able to defend ourselves. Someone’s gotta get in there and distract him until the rest of us can find our way in, and your phone’s the only device that can do it that quickly.”

  Phillip said, “Just go in and get him out in public. Keep him occupied, and we’ll be there as fast as we can.”

  Martin opened the imp box and pressed the glowing screen of his phone a few times. His eyes darted to Gwen’s just in time to see her look away. He looked at Phillip and said “I love this plan! I’m excited to be a part of it. Let’s do it!”

  Phillip said, “Ghostbusters.” He smiled, part out of admiration, part because he was delighted to get a pop culture reference for once.

  Martin pressed the screen of his phone and disappeared. He reappeared standing roughly where Jimmy had stood when he turned the Orcs on them. He was on the other side of the barrier. The wizards watched as Martin flew into the air, then swung around and accelerated toward the castle.

  “Do you think he can do it?” Gwen asked.

  Phillip smiled. “His job is to draw attention to himself and get into trouble. I don’t think he’s capable of not doing it.”

  Chapter 27.

  Before Martin flew to the castle, he wheeled around to get a look at the wizards. They were a small clump of people, surrounded by a chaotic mass of enraged two-dimensional demons. He noted that Phillip and Gwen were both watching him.

  Martin turned toward the castle and accelerated. He had full shell access, and the use of all of the macros in the system. As he flew low over the rooftops, he muttered, “Ĉi tiu iras al la dek unu,” the trigger phrase for a macro he’d found while researching his salutation. It was a bit of Gary’s handiwork. Anything he said now would be amplified to the approximate volume of a speed-metal concert.

  Martin shouted, “MEEERRRLINN!” in the angriest sounding voice he could muster, and repeated it every few seconds, almost like a siren. He wanted Jimmy to feel the same feeling in the pit of his stomach Martin felt when he was being chased by the federal agents, what felt like years ago. He streaked across the medieval skyline, a silver blur, shrieking Merlin’s name with eardrum-shattering intensity. Not a single living thing was unaware of him. Countless items were dropped as people put their hands to their ears and looked to the sky, just a moment too late. He was moving too quickly to easily track. All eyes turned to where Martin had just been.

  Martin slowed as he approached the castle, then stopped so suddenly that he nearly lost his grip on his staff. He swung for a moment as his body’s momentum spent itself. Finally, he settled to a standing position, hovering fifty feet in the air above the front courtyard. The guards stood their ground, but they didn’t look happy about it. Martin let out another ear splitting “MEEERRRLINN!”

  The guards seemed to hear a sound too faint and distant for Martin to pick up. They looked behind themselves, then parted. Jimmy, looking very small, slid into view, covering a space of several yards in a single step. With a second step he glided through the arch and stopped in front of the castle entrance. He cleared his throat, then in a voice much calmer, but every bit as loud, said, “MAAARRTINN! Good to see you. Do come in!”

  Martin had designed his salutation to be modular. In this situation, the parts where he transported himself to the stage area, transported himself away unseen, and watched the statue break dance autonomously would not be needed.

  A good key phrase for a macro should be something that is memorable in times of stress, but that you’re unlikely to say in normal conversation. Martin said, “Groovy.” Immediately, lines delineating the rectangular shapes of boxes started tracing the contours of his form. As he fell from the sky, his body divided into hundreds of silver boxes which dispersed, swirled, multiplied, and reformed into a thirty foot tall version of Martin, which landed heavily in a three point crouch, holding its staff above and behind it with its right arm.

  Only the boxes that made up the hands, feet, and staff had any mass. The rest looked solid, but were without substance. Suspended at the point of center mass, Martin floated, mimicking the three point crouch. Any motion Martin made, the statue made. Martin had tested it with a doll-sized test version of the statue, but he’d never tried it at scale, and was nervous about his ability to walk. He avoided the problem by flying. He launched himself straight at the entrance, and Jimmy. He barreled forward, the statue skimming only a few feet above the cobblestones. His massive right hand grasped Jimmy and lifted him roughly. Since he was entering with Merlin, the shell didn’t stop him as he streaked through the arch, and tumbled gracelessly through the antechamber. He ground to a stop in the great hall, his massive feet sliding on the marble floor. As he stopped, he flung Jimmy with great force toward that far wall. He knew that with the shell enabled Jimmy would not be damaged. It would hurt, but Jimmy had earned some hurt. As he let go, he heard Jimmy say something. It sounded like groovier, which made no sense.

  As Jimmy hurtled forward, his body glowed blue and shattered into hundreds of glowing blue plasma balls. The spheres swirled and multiplied before reforming into a forty foot tall statue of Jimmy. Giant Jimmy hit the far wall, but with most of the force dissipated. He came to a rest standing with his massive feet on either side of the throne.

  “How do you like my new macro?” Merlin asked. “I made it myself from parts I found in the shell. Oh, and I want you to know that I appreciate you calling me Merlin.”

  “Yeah, I was being sarcastic,” Martin groaned.

  Back in the center of the writhing mass of silent demons, the wizards were making slow progress. Gwen, Jeff, and Felix were transporting wizards to
Phillip’s shop as fast as they could, but with text editors and access to the raw file, it was a slow process. They had to work with each individual wizard to find their entry, then manually enter the coordinates for Phillip’s shop. It would have been difficult work in a quiet study. Standing in a field being silently attacked by ineffectual demons and working on tiny smartphone screens made it much harder. Hearing Martin’s shouting, followed by silence had made it nearly impossible.

  Phillip did some quick math. Assuming twenty-two wizards, taking at least thirty seconds to transport each, then using his computer to dig up safe transport coordinates (it wouldn’t help Martin if his rescue brigade materialized in the middle of a wall), he figured it would be well over five minutes before they got him any help. Phillip listened for a moment. In the distance he heard crashing noises and amplified grunts.

  They had to get help to Martin faster.

  “How many have we transported so far?” he asked.

  Gwen was peering at the phone’s screen. One of the Parisian wizards was standing closer than he really needed to, looking over her shoulder to help isolate his file entry. She answered, “Four,” without looking up.

  “Okay, change of plan. Jeff, Felix, keep sending people to my shop. Gwen, you’re going to send me to the shop, then you’ll follow. I have a plan.”

  Martin could see Jimmy suspended in the torso of Giant Jimmy. Martin had to admit that the matrix of glowing blue plasma balls made for an impressive statue, especially when it was sprinting across the massive gold and marble expanse of the great hall of the castle Camelot, intent on doing him harm. Martin barely managed to get Giant Martin up on one foot and one knee before Giant Jimmy was on top of him. Martin put up his hands, catching Jimmy’s as they came down with tremendous force. Martin held Jimmy at bay, the two massive forms held in stalemate. Within their giant effigies, Martin and Jimmy could see each other, one looking through a screen of floating plasma balls, the other through a field of silver boxes.