Engineered Magic

1 AL: Irene

Irene went to the medical department early the next morning. She approached the admission counter and asked for Mary Whitman.

“Mary? Why did you want to see her?” the clerk asked.

“She is my sister,” Irene responded.

“Oh, I see,” the clerk responded. “She is not in this morning. There were two deaths last night. She didn’t leave until the early hours of the morning. I am not expecting her to get here until noon or later.”

“Deaths?” Irene echoed in shock.

“It seems like a lot of the flight crew feel like their job is done and they are not needed anymore. They just seem to fade away,” the clerk responded.

“I guess I need to see someone else,” Irene said. “I need to get a fertility control implant.”

“Good, I wish more people would come in for them,” he responded. The clerk led Irene to a small privacy cubicle where a technician waited. The technician inserted the implant into her upper arm in under ten minutes. He told her to come back if she experienced sharp pain or redness at the injection site. She should have the implant replaced after three years. Irene thanked him.

She spent the day trying not to rub her arm feeling for the implant. Every time she found herself rubbing it, she remembered she didn’t pass on the information that people were going into the ruins unofficially. She thought about telling Dennis, the shift supervisor, as she was waiting for the day’s task list. Darien was standing close by and she didn’t feel like she should do it in front of him. So she remained silent as she accepted her list of work.

She was given a list of floors to pull and clean the air filters. She worked on it all day but only got about half of them done. She would have to finish up tomorrow. She was damp, dirty and tired when she returned to the engineering center. She was glad she only checked out a minimum of tools. It was quick to check them back in.

Her arm ached but she wasn’t certain if it was from the day's work or her failure to stop touching it. She lingered in the tool room until the last of the shift left for the day. She wanted to talk to Agatha privately. Irene slid into the familiar chair next to Agatha. A large spreadsheet was open on Agatha’s workstation. It was full of codes and numbers.

“I found out that a couple groups of people have snuck off into the ruins on their own,” Irene said after the usual greetings.

“Yes,” Agatha agreed as if that was old news. “Command is trying to keep it quiet. They don’t want to encourage others.”

“They know?” Irene asked. “Why don’t they stop it?”

“It is in our bylaws that anyone who wants to leave the colony must always be allowed to do so,” Agatha explained. “Half the reason the Speedwell was built was because people dreamed of escaping the governments of Earth.”

“Oh,” Irene said. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

“Everyone that leaves is a resource loss for the colony. Plus Command doesn’t like anyone’s chances of surviving in the ruins long term. They issued a recall for the official teams a while ago but we are having pretty severe communication problems. No one knows if the message made it through,” Agatha explained.

“I thought communications got better when they reached that green area,” Irene commented.

“It did but when they entered the structure on the other side there was a complete blackout. We are not certain if it is just the structure blocking the transmission or if there was an equipment failure. The rate of equipment failure has been very high. It can’t be explained by wear and tear since it was the items that weren’t used much that failed first. Except for the guns, they were definitely used but they failed long before the teams even reached the green area.”

“That is odd,” Irene agreed. Irene thought about it. “I just don’t see the appeal,” she told Agatha. “Wild animals, poor living conditions and equipment failures, that just doesn’t sound fun to me.”

“I thought you were young,” the old woman countered. “It is an adventure! Free food from trees you don’t have to plant. Unlimited housing you don’t have to build. You get to make your own decisions and not live under someone else's rules,” Agatha expounded. “And don’t forget the magic! How can anyone give magic a pass?”

“Magic?” Irene echoed back. “I thought you were trying to convince me there for a second. Magic isn’t real.”

“Oh the magic is very real,” Agatha responded. Irene gave Agatha a look that said it all. She thought the old woman had lost it. Agatha laughed. “Don’t give me that look. Let me show you,” she turned to her terminal and began to pull up her evidence. “You know that old saying about advanced technology looking like magic? Well I think what we have here is someone actively trying to make it look that way.”

Agatha closed the spreadsheet and opened up several camera recordings. Irene was surprised to find she recognized them. They were different views of a group of explorers throwing apples at animals in the trees. They were larger than rats. They were at least two feet long. They were nimble and ran up and down the tree trunks and branches like it was the ground. It was the same event Agatha was watching weeks ago, the day Darien first told Irene about the explorers eating apples.

“I have matched the time on all these feeds. Watch this next throw carefully,” Agatha said. She played a short section. A man scooped an apple up off the forest floor and hurled it at an advancing animal. He was visible on three of the four views. The fourth view was a better image of his target. Irene saw the apple fly into the image and fall short. The animal shrieked and ran off. Agatha stopped the video.

“He missed,” Irene commented.

“Yes, he did,” Agatha agreed. “Now watch the squirrel closely as I switch over to infrared.” The images changed to a weird false color. The animals, which must be what Agatha was calling squirrels, were a duller color than the humans. Either they were cooler or their fur was blocking some of the infrared. The man threw the apple. The apple was much harder to see. It was nearly the color of the surrounding plant life. It picked up very little heat from the thrower. She lost sight of it somewhere mid flight. Suddenly the squirrel flared a bright white. It shrieked and ran away.

“Whoa,” Irene said sitting back in her chair, “what was that?”

“Let me play it for you one more time,” Agatha said as she reset it to normal lighting. She tapped the screen, drawing Irene’s attention to a woman standing slightly behind the man throwing the apple. “Keep your eyes on her.”

The man scooped the apple off the forest floor. He swung his arm back preparing to throw. As his arm swept forward the woman’s head snapped around. The apple fell short. The woman’s eyes followed a path slightly above the apple that ended at the squirrel. She stumbled back a step as if what she saw frightened her. The animal shrieked. Agatha stopped the recording.

“She saw something we don’t,” Irene observed.

“Yes, I think so,” Agatha responded. “If I play it again, you can see that everyone reacts to some degree. When all we were getting was written reports I thought there might be something in the ruins that was causing hallucinations. After all, the hallucinogen LSD comes from a type of fungus. Even a slight effect like halos around objects could explain most of what was reported. That doesn’t explain the group all reacting at the same time nor that temperature spike.”

“What do you think it is?” Irene asked.

“I think he threw a fireball. The group spends the next couple hours throwing apples until our wizard here realizes he doesn’t actually need an apple to get the effect. Late in the day one of the others has some success but instead of a heat spike we actually see a drop in the body temperature of the songbird they hit,” Agatha continued.

“Ice-bolt,” Irene said. “I heard two people at the stick fighting practice last night arguing over which was better, fireball or ice-bolt. But how can they be seeing things the camera doesn’t pick up?”

“I think it is a type of augmented reality,” Agatha said.

“Augmented what?” Irene asked.

“We used to have training glasses that used augmented reality. A set was in storage for training the engineering crew for landing. A lot of the equipment used for the landing wasn’t used for generations during the flight. It all needed to be serviced before landing. It was also dangerous enough that a single mistake could have killed us all. The glasses worked by overlaying an animation of the work you were to do directly onto your eyes when you looked at the target area. Unfortunately they were incredibly fragile and I haven’t seen a working pair in years,” Agatha commented.

“They aren’t wearing glasses,” Irene countered.

“No but with a better technology level than ours, perhaps you don’t need glasses. Historically we used glasses to correct a person’s vision. From there we started using corrective lenses that were set directly on the eye. Now we just reshape the cornea. What if the explorers have gotten something super small embedded in their cornea that is feeding them false images?”

“How small?”

“There is theoretical work in our databases about building nanobots to clean our blood and help with tissue repair after a high dose of radiation. I don’t think they were ever built but something small enough to travel in our blood stream could colonize our cornea’s easily enough. In fact that kind of technology could explain the heat spike too. What if the squirrel’s blood was already filled with these tiny machines? A control signal could have told those machines to produce heat. While a different signal would tell them to absorb heat.”

Irene thought about what Agatha described. She would have to read up about nanobots. Even without that detailed information Irene could see how it might work.

“Is that what you think it is then?” Irene asked.

“Yes and no,” Agatha replied. “That explanation covers this incident fairly well but there are other events that were reported that I can’t explain with that theory. I think multiple technologies and techniques have been used. Some of those technologies may be beyond our own knowledge.”

“How do you think he triggered it?” Irene asked.

“This is the really interesting part,” Agatha said. She turned back to the monitor. She closed most of the views keeping the one with the best view of the thrower. She zoomed in on his hand and played the film in slow motion. “See how he flexes his hand before he picks up the apple?”

In the recording the thrower rolled his fingers and made a fist. His action made Irene think he was experiencing some kind of cramp in his hand. He reached down and picked up the apple in a smooth motion.

“Now,” Agatha said, “look at his grip.” Irene studied the image. The apple was large and he held it with his fingers evenly spaced around it.

“Ok,” Irene said.

“Just a second,” Agatha said. She pulled up a list of files and selected a different video. This one was of a woman. It was later in the day. Irene could see that the whole area was torn up with bits of broken apple everywhere. The woman was actively rubbing her right hand with her left. Irene got the impression the woman injured her pinky somehow. Agatha zoomed in as the woman flexed her fingers one more time and made a fist. She made a throwing gesture aiming at something offscreen. She held her first three fingers together while her pinky and thumb were both out to the side.

Agatha stopped the recording. “After that she dances around in victory for a while and everyone asks her how she did it.” Irene lifted her hand. She rolled her fingers around and pulled them down into a fist.

“So they both stretched their fingers and made a fist first,” Irene said.

“The fireball was the result of the throw motion with all his fingers spread, or five groupings. While the ice-bolt was made when the throwing motion was made with her fingers in three groups,” Agatha commented. She pulled up one of the images she produced from the inscriptions. “I don’t know if you remember this but what does it look like to you?”

The image was one of the smaller pieces. There was just a bit of a curled line on one edge, with part of a jagged diamond on the other edge.

“A rough diamond?” Irene suggested.

“What if it is ice?” Agatha said. “I suggest that because the secondary symbol in this one is that upside down y. I think it represents the number three.”

“And she threw the ice-bolt with her fingers in three groups,” Irene observed. “But if it was that simple wouldn’t they all be able to do it on the first try?”

“I am still researching that part,” Agatha said. She pulled up the spreadsheet she was looking at earlier. “From what I have been able to figure out, you need to do the motion near perfectly for fifteen to twenty tries before it will succeed.”

“Twenty times!” Irene exclaimed.

“Luckily our explorers were throwing those apples at squirrels for days. The squirrels are very protective of the trees,” Agatha commented. “After the first successful cast, it is hit and miss for about twenty more. Beyond that it appears the control system starts to learn a caster’s unique idiosyncrasies. The wizards' style can vary quite a little and the cast will still be successful.”

“That first inscription. Wasn’t the secondary symbol a cross?” Irene asked.

“Yes,” Agatha replied, “the number four.”

“So you think if I did this,” Irene said as she rolled her fingers into a fist. She made a throwing motion spreading all her fingers except the first two which she held together. “I would throw a bolt of lightning?”

“Yep,” Agatha replied, “I think that is exactly what that inscription was telling us.” Irene thought about it for a moment.

“So someone engineered magic, just like they engineered the ruin,” Irene observed.

“That is my theory,” Agatha replied.