Scott Meyer - Off to Be the Wizard

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

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 didnt consider himself a hacker. He didnt like the attitude that the label implied. Sure, as a teenager hed 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 wasnt 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 wouldnt bother with him as long as actual perpetrators were roaming free. He told himself that. He was too smart to really believe it. That didnt 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 hadnt done anything particularly bad. He didnt 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 hadnt, 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 wasnt 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, Martins 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 wasnt 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, hed been putting six feet two inches on every form hed 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. Theyd 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 hed 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 didnt dust that spot often, because he couldnt 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 hed 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 didnt 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 cabinets 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 Martins desk chair. Martin scanned the room and told himself that hed always been able to see the top of the refrigerator, and that he was only noticing it now because it was so dusty.