True Magic

Saffine stared out of the plastiglass bubble window of the railway carriage full of scientists. The sun was rapidly setting in the twilight-less manner of planetoids without atmosphere. The sun shone as bright as ever, casting impossibly stark shadows in the dusty craters, and then winked out instantly as it sank behind the horizon. He had been hired by some branch of the Cosmic Union's sprawling government, assigned to a nebulous project, given a half-explanation, and told that he'd be allowed to know more when he arrived at the secure facility.

The other scientists were in the same boat. They sat murmuring amongst themselves in hushed conversation, speculating, comparing knowledge, or leafing through the thick sheaves of partially redacted papers in government binders covered with access control stamps. It wasn't that Saffine didn't care about the revelations. It was quite the opposite. Saffine simply couldn't wait until he could hear the full, uncensored briefing; he knew that spending hours speculating would drive him mad with anticipation. It was better to just stare out the window and watch as the lights came on for the night in the distant moon-city domes, tiny and twinkling across the cratered expanse, and ignore the fact that he had just learned something that turned all of science upside down.

The darkling moon plain outside the window was abruptly cut off by the impassive wall of a tunnel. Saffine kept looking out the window until he was sure the train wouldn't emerge on the surface again. He figured the facility was probably deep underground. The train compartment felt suddenly much more claustrophobic in the enclosure of the tunnel. The only sounds were the murmurs of conversation and the hissing of pressurized air. It reminded him faintly of college, when the whole engineering dorm would get together to work through a particularly tricky homework assignment. The recycled air reeked of cigarette smoke. Saffine fidgeted with the thick binder in his lap.

He had promised himself he wouldn't obsessively read through it again . He knew it would only make the trip feel longer. He tried to resist temptation and failed. Like he had already done a dozen times in the last five hours, he slowly opened the binder. The first page bore the prosaically bureaucratic title "Report of the Investigation of Direct Effects of the Central Nervous System and Myotransfer, ST-CS-01-169-72".

In fact, the entire file was written in the same stilted science-ese, that invented a whole new set of jargon-words so it wouldn't have to state its fantastical conclusion directly. Even so, the subtext was no more subtle than the cover art of a pulp magazine. Magic, it seemed to scream in block letters, was real.

It provided an exhaustive list of historical examples. A cloister of medieval necromancers that convened to poison a prince from afar, with apparent success. An 1890s magician who was smothered in his bed, at the very same time when a rival's followers were conducting a candlelit ritual praying for that very eventuality. A string of unusual, but thankfully more benign happenings related to the UFO religions. And finally, the incident that led to the investigation: a terroristic bombing in a major Cosmic Union governmental building, conducted by a fanatical religious cult, with no possible means to carry out the attack - but magic. A plethora of experiments conducted thereafter finally proved the efficacy of the phenomenon.

The old occult rituals had worked occasionally, the report said, but a lack of concentration and scientific understanding amongst its practitioners had rendered their effects blunt, usually impotent, and destructive. The Cosmic Union investigators, by applying modern methods, had achieved much better results. With enough well-educated minds in marshaled mental harmony, focusing on the same task, everything from solid objects to thoughts could be moved or destroyed or transmuted or teleported or scryed on from thousands of miles away.

Even more startling was the fact that the report was ten years old. It was no coincidence that faster-than-light travel was also ten years old. It turned out that Einstein's old laws actually were immutable; it was magic that let Earth's ships dart among the stars.

Infuriatingly, that was the point where the report ended. It said plainly that the government had not only discovered but had developed and utilized magic - for an entire decade. But it didn't say a thing about what those developments were. Nor did it lay out even a single theory about where the magic came from. And why was the Cosmic Union recruiting so many new scientists for the project at once, why now? Saffine closed the binder. He was starting to get a headache.

It had taken a hundred people in the experimental groups to successfully move a small apple. Saffine wondered how many people it took to move a spaceship. Additionally, to manipulate an object, the experimental groups had to understand it through-and-through down to the level of the atoms, and he didn't think very many people could conceptualize a spaceship from the ground up. Fantastical childhood images came to mind, of wizard councils and magic academies. He thought of the stern-faced scientists who wrote the report and tried to imagine them wearing star-studded purple robes and pointed hats. He still had no idea what kind of work he was going to be doing.

It wasn't a good idea to read so much in the dim light of the railway carriage, Saffine decided. His headache was only getting worse, pounding like a mallet on the inside of his skull. He didn't want to finally arrive at the much-awaited destination only to be miserable with pain. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep off the headache. He had a few minutes of peace.

"It really makes you think, doesn't it?" a voice asked out of the dark. Saffine begrudgingly opened his eyes. One of the other scientists had sat down across from him. Habbo, that was his name. They had gone to college together.

"I've never really believed in God," Habbo continued, "but when you think about all these new developments… it’s like the universe was designed for us to live in it. Or at least for intelligent life."

Saffine tried not to groan and forced himself to halfheartedly shrug and say: "I'm just waiting to see what the brass hats at the facility tell us." He didn't want to get into a theological debate before and he sure as hell didn't want to get into one now, when a headache was trying to murder him. He got up to look for a better place to rest.

"But think about it, what are the sheer chances that human brainwave patterns can have such a power over the universe…" Habbo continued.

Saffine walked away. There was no sleeper car on the train. The luggage car wasn't pressurized. The oxygen room was locked. The bathroom was the bathroom. Finally, he went to one of the empty seats at the end of the carriage and curled up on the clean-enough carpet beneath it.

******

When Saffine awoke, his headache had subsided, but the railway carriage was silent, stopped and empty. The airlock doors of the train were open. Saffine had been left behind. He muttered several curse words under his breath. He hoped he hadn't missed the briefing.

The train was pulled up to a well-lit underground platform. Nobody was about. A set of double doors led off of the platform. Saffine found they were unlocked.

He pushed through the doors and found himself at one end of an institutionally featureless hallway. The curvature of the planetoid hid its terminus from his sight. And there was a smell, like a refrigerator full of spoiled fish. The scent of decay, masked by antiseptic.

"Hello?" he shouted. There was no reply.

When Saffine walked, his footsteps on the linoleum tiling sounded out as clipped clicks. From door to door he went, down the hallway. Most were locked. A few opened into disused rooms; laboratories of unplugged equipment, offices with empty desks, storage rooms stacked to the ceiling with sheetless mattresses or bedframes. Other doors revealed side-corridors, narrow and winding.

He began mentally rehearsing what he'd say to his superiors. He'd apologize for falling asleep, and hope that they didn't think him a Mizarian spy for wandering about the facility unsupervised. He'd definitely missed the briefing by now. The fluorescent lights buzzed, reverberating against his soul. Despite himself he felt overwhelmed with despair. Where the hell was everybody? There had been around seventy-five fellow new hires on that train, and they had to be somewhere.

Somewhere down one of the side-corridors was the faint whirr-hum of a motor. Where there was machinery, there must be people to maintain it. He set off towards the noise.

The hallway ended in a lone door, thankfully unlocked. The room beyond was dark but for a bank of blinking computer control boards. The whirr-hum steadily emanated from the computers' cooling fans. Saffine slumped down in a stray rolling chair. No more corridor-wandering. He was going to sit right there until somebody found him.

There was a shuttered window on the wall. Perhaps the facility wasn't as deep underground as he'd believed. Curiosity or boredom motivated Saffine to open it.

Bright light flooded in past the opened curtains. The window looked out onto a massive auditorium of whitewash and sanitary tile. Saffine at first thought the gigantic rectangular shape that sat in the center of the floor was made of raw hamburger meat. The thing, like an enormous prism of spam, stretched from the floor to the ceiling, to the left and to the right as far as he could see. He stared at it a long time, in confusion and then horror. First, he noticed that the flesh wasn't dead - it was slowly pulsating, almost jiggling. Second, he noticed that it wasn't made of cow's flesh, or any flesh at all - but the gray matter of a hundred thousand human brains.

******

The security patrol robot caught Saffine while he was making a mad dash back to the train. A stun-gun sent him straight into unconsciousness. When he woke up again, he couldn't see anything. He couldn't feel anything either, not his limbs nor his lungs breathing.

"Hello?" Saffine said—or thought. He couldn't feel his mouth move.

Saffine! Saffine! It's me, Habbo… Someone's got to notice that we're missing, that something happened… Saffine, I can't feel my hands, I think I'm hurt.

The voice came from inside his head. Saffine could hardly tell it apart from his own thoughts. That was odd. What do you mean you can't tell your thoughts from mine? My gods, Habbo, can't you see what's happened to us? I remember being escorted into a room with the others and then what, Saffine? Did we fall into a cave? I don't recall, I think we fell into a cave? I'm worried about my hands. I hope they didn't get crushed. I'll simply perish from existence if I can't play piano anymore. I should practice more. I hope my hands are okay. Gods, Habbo, we aren't going to be rescued. The Cosmic Union's a big place, we're just grains of sand in a desert.

Then all at once, a wave of noise hit Saffine, the screams of a million minds, in all the languages of the galaxy. Some called out to their families, who never would hear. Some cursed, some cried. Some, Like Habbo were tragically confused, wondering why they couldn't see anything, why they couldn't move. But Saffine knew, he knew exactly what had occurred, and that's why he screamed the loudest.

That's when the impulse rushed like a wave through the interlocking brains. Saffine remembered the term "Computer-Guided Thought Patterns" from somewhere. Unwillingly, like an insurmountable instinct, each brain focused its thoughts on transporting a small warship, the first of a fleet, from the outskirts of the Solar System to the Mizar and Alcor star system, eighty-three light years away. Each brain was scientifically trained. Each brain did its job well. Out in the void of space, true magic took place.

THE END

E-mail: Zedward Smith

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