Off to Be the Wizard Read Free

He put a great deal of thought into all the things he should not do. Things that might be possible, using the file, but would probably lead to no good. Having spent all Friday collecting dangerous ideas, that night when he sat at his computer, he had no shortage of things to try, and a whole weekend to try them in.

Chapter 3.

    First, Martin selected the entire chunk of data that he now believed was essentially him, and copied it to a separate file, which he encrypted and copied to the storage card on his phone.
    The second thing Martin did was move the decimal on his bank account three spots to the right. He considered making himself a millionaire, but why risk it when he could make himself a thousandaire anytime he wanted.
    I have to be careful , he thought. I don’t want to screw this up.
    At first he wondered how something as complex as a human being could be described in a chunk of data that was small enough to be managed, but once he calmed down and thought about it, he could see how it might work. He saw that the file was a list of parameters, but not detailed descriptions. He could see the code that defined his heart. He verified this by taking his pulse and watching the numbers fluctuate in real time. The numbers made no sense to him. They might not even make sense to a cardiologist, but they changed predictably in time with his pulse. The code described what the heart was doing, and the ways in which it might differ from other people’s hearts, but not what it, as a heart, was. It was as if somewhere else there was another file that described human hearts in detail, and every person’s data referred to that to render their specific heart. The same went for all the other organs, although this was much less interesting to him once he realized that he had no access to the fundamental structure of his body, and could not, for example, make his skeleton an unbreakable metal.
    There were other shortcuts built into the system as well. He ran a search for his current longitude and latitude. He understood the notation thanks to a brief flirtation in his late teens withgeocaching, and had access to the actual numbers thanks to his smartphone. When he found his exact coordinates in the file he decided to move around and see if they changed. He walked backward slowly while peering at his monitor with an ever-increasing squint. The numbers appeared to be changing as he moved. So, instead of tracking each person’s absolute position in space, the system tracked them in relation to the Earth. After the coordinates there was a number that he saw was his height above sea level. Martin jumped, and though it was hard to read the screen while jumping, he could see that the number changed while he was in midair, then returned to its starting point by the time he landed.
    Martin knew what he had to do next. If he didn’t try, he’d wonder for the rest of his life.
    No, that’s not true, he thought. I’d wonder until I eventually broke down and tried it anyway, so I might as well try it now.
    He hunched over the desk without sitting, swallowed hard and increased his altitude notation by one foot. He exhaled slowly.
    “Now we see if I can fly,” he said out loud to posterity, posterity in this case being his empty apartment. He hit the enter key.
    Instantly he was one foot off the ground. Just as instantly he was falling one foot to the ground. Slightly less instantly his full weight came down hard on the floor and his desk, jamming both of his wrists and twisting his right ankle. He was almost able to remain upright, but eventually fell backward very hard into his desk chair, which bent permanently from the strain and knocked the wind out of him. As he sat, trying to get the air back into his lungs, he could hear his downstairs neighbor hitting her ceiling with a broom and yelling at him to quiet down.
    Okay, Martin thought, I can’t fly, but I can fall whenever I want.
    Martin turned his attention back to the longitude and