Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="NiTessine" data-source="post: 2025467" data-attributes="member: 475">DeterminismWill had known it was going to get weird the moment he saw the black-robed man flying towards him at 500 feet, apparently under his own power (3), but he never anticipated how weird. As he had dangled from his parachute, gently descending and looking at the rapidly disappearing man, it had occurred to him that perhaps he’d accidentally jumped into a military test zone for hi-tech toys, and there’d be men in black waiting on the ground to take him away. Why one such would be located where he was parachuting every week was beyond him, but it had been the only rational explanation his mind could formulate.Once his ‘chute had been cut off and he had been grabbed from behind in midair, he had come to the inevitable conclusion that rationality was out of the game.With his helmet and the disconcertingly high speed, he’d been unable to take a look at his assailant, and resigned to trying to pinpoint where he was being taken. Whatever power he had been flown under was apparently soundless. They’d dropped in altitude to nearly brush the treetops, and Will had lost sense of where they were headed.Now, he was sitting on a cold, smooth stone floor in a cave where he’d been dropped. It was a hole in the sheer cliff face, with a drop of hundreds of feet into a river. He could not remember a place like that anywhere nearby the airfield, or in the whole state for that matter. The man who’d dropped him had flown away, leaving a cloud of brimstone-smelling smoke that dissipated soon. Will had only been able to glimpse his kidnapper before he flew off, but he’d seen the man wore the same black robe as the first flier he’d observed.The cave was small, with smooth, round walls that curved into the ceiling just above Will’s head. It was too even, too smooth to be natural. It was man-made, and he was starting to like it less and less. For the sake of experiment, he walked to the edge of the opening and shouted at the top of his lungs:“HELP!”“It’s not going to work, you know,” said a calm voice from behind him. Startled, Will turned around. There was an old, short man with a neat white moustache, clad in black robes like a monk. The ghost of a smile played around the corners of his mouth. Behind him was a dark opening in the wall that hadn’t been there moments before.“Who are you? What are you going to do to me?” Will requested.“I am Edgar. I… We will show you something. Worry not, you will not be harmed,” the old man replied in a reassuring manner. Will thought he detected the hint of an English accent. “Please, follow me, and you will receive your explanations in due time, William.”“How do you know my name? Is this some sort of sick joke that my friends put you up to?”“I would be surprised indeed if your friends had access to resources such as ours,” Edgar replied and turned around, disappearing into the dark doorway. After a moment’s hesitation, Will followed.There was a lightless tunnel that went on for many minutes. A glow emanated from something held by Edgar, silhouetting his shape with pale luminescence and casting a weak light upon the stone walls. Finally, it terminated into a dead end, a smooth stone wall. Edgar spoke words in a language that Will could not comprehend, and a way opened, but not in a way he had ever seen a door open. No slab of rock slid away to let them pass, no door swung open in front of them. Rather, the rock itself contracted, reminiscent of a flexing muscle, and a hole opened in it, expanding to let he two men pass.“How did that..?” Will started once they were through, but Edgar cut him off:“It is the weakest of the things you will see here today and learn to do tomorrow.”“Learn to do? What was that?”“It’s easiest to think of it as magic,” Edgar replied nonchalantly. “The author Philip K. Dick once said that any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.”“And I suppose you’re a wizard?”“I prefer the term magus, plural magi, but ‘wizard’ does capture the essence of it, though in a tacky manner.”“This is just like that Harry Potter movie, right? You’re gonna teach me magic?”Will couldn’t see Edgar’s face, but somehow he could tell the old man winced.“Yes, that is essentially it. This was so much easier before that Rowling woman made magic popular. As for why we picked you, it’s because a) you can be trained, it’s in your genes, and b) you are single, have no living family and virtually no social contact outside of your workplace, landlord and parachuting instructor.”“And all this time, they thought it was the government who’s spying on us.”“Oh, they’re doing it too. We’re just better.”“Hey, do tinfoil hats really work against mind control rays?”“Not really, but then, one would need a mind to be controlled.”The tunnel widened into a chamber, this one with actual furniture and small glowing bulbs on the walls shedding light into the room. There was a cushioned chair and a small table upon which lay a book. What first attracted Will’s notice, though was the man standing near the wall. He was bearded, had a bit of a gut, and in his both hands he held miniature versions of himself, cut off at the waist. The miniature men in turn held smaller versions of themselves who held even smaller ones, and so on. (1)“Take a seat, William, I’ll be along shortly,” Edgar said, paying no mind to the strange man.“Who’s he?”“Not ‘who’, ‘what’. Not ‘he’, ‘it’. To tell you the truth, we’re a bit confused about it. From what we’ve been able to tell, it’s the first actually functioning perpetual motion machine. It keeps replicating those handheld mini-men, drawing power from the process to fuel the process itself. It’s paradoxical in so many ways it makes my brain hurt if I think of it for too long. Theoretically, it’s an eternal power source. Theoretically, it also has an infinite surface, thus fusing it with the very fabric of reality and all that sort of thing. We never figured out any practical use for it, so we put it here. One of the older members of our order created it before he passed away several years ago. Now, wait.”Obediently, Will sat down, as Edgar departed via another strangely opening hole in the wall. He was vaguely aware he was trapped, but somehow Edgar gave off a reassuring feeling, which in itself was disconcerting. Pushing it away from his mind, he turned his attention to the book.The cover was red leather, and bore the gold-embossed title “William Guildenstern”.He was not surprised. He opened the book and leafed through it. There was a detailed chapter on his family tree, his school years, his first job as a park ranger – here he paused to glance at a peculiar photograph. It was a sepia-toned group shot from his ranger days, with all others blurred away. He remembered the photo, had it back home in a photo album, but in colour with all the other rangers in it. Will frowned, just as Edgar returned.“What did you do to this photo?” Will asked him.“PhotoShop. I needed the practice. Come, you are going to meet some people.”“Who?”“Fellow magi.”Incredulously, Will followed.They passed through another short tunnel and came to a door. It was a white, wooden one, with a brass handle. Edgar opened it.The room beyond was very ordinary, and as such, so very out of place in the cavern network they’d just passed through. It looked like a normal middle-class home, with a rug on the floor, mildly kitschy porcelain animals on the windowsill, and Ikea furniture. From the window he saw a well-kept yard, a white picket fence, and the kind of normal, mould-cast suburb that people love to make fun of.In the room were two women, holding small pets. One, whom Edgar went on to introduce as Katherine, held a small dog that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the end of a broomstick and the other a cat with a hat. This one was introduced as Maria. They were smiling, but strangely quiet. Then the cat spoke.“Welcome, William. We have been expecting you.”Will blinked a few times, then recollected himself. He was beginning to get ready to believe anything.“Hello…”“We messed up an experiment, okay? We don’t like to talk about it, especially not on my birthday.”“Err… congratulations.”“Thanks,” the cat answered as the woman took her to a table where stood a cake. It had a marzipan cat on it. “Technically, it’s the cat’s birthday, but I celebrate it anyway. When you’re stuck in a body without opposable thumbs, you use every excuse to party.”The woman held the cat in one hand, and picked up a knife in the other. Then, holding the cat’s paw over the knife’s handle, she cut the cake. (2)Will shot a questioning glance at Edgar, who merely shrugged.“Here, sit down, have some cake,” the cat invited. “And then we shall discuss your future.”</blockquote>

Verification