Off to Be the Wizard Read Free Page A

latitude. He took his smartphone to the far corner of his bedroom and noted the GPS reading. He returned to the computer, sat down and entered the coordinates. He took a deep breath, hit enter, and he was in the far corner of his bedroom. His feet were on solid ground, but the rest of him was in a seated position with no chair beneath him. His weight came down on his tailbone. It didn’t break, but it felt like it wanted to. He took a moment before he got up and walked back to the computer. The downstairs neighbor was hitting the ceiling even harder and yelling even louder. He pictured her trying to get her damage deposit back, claiming the hundreds of broom handle marks had been there when she moved in. This made him smile.
    He now knew he could teleport. He also knew that he had to put thought into how he’d do it, or he could seriously hurt himself. Again, he looked at the GPS app. He picked a spot about a mile away, a place that would be well lit, but where nobody would see him: the side parking lot of a Boston Market franchise. He entered the coordinates, stood up, bent his knees to absorb any shocks, extended his arms slightly for better balance, gritted his teeth, and hit enter.
    He was in the side parking lot of the Boston Market. He was glad that he hadn’t changed out of his work clothes when he got home, and that his wallet was still in his pocket. He wished he’d kept his shoes on, and his keys in his pocket, but you can’t have everything. He lived in the Pacific Northwest, so he was grateful that only the pavement was wet and not the air itself. He walked home, eating a bad Boston Market meatloaf sandwich, thinking about what he would do next, both about the file and his spare apartment keys, which he’d left with his downstairs neighbor.
    Who better? He thought . She’s always home. She pays close attention to what’s going on.
    His wrists, ankle, and tailbone hurt, but the walk home and the ruining of a good pair of wool socks were totally worth it, both for the time it gave him to think and for the look on his downstairs neighbor’s face.
    “Why are you being so loud up there?” she asked.
    “What do you mean? I wasn’t home. I walked to Boston Market. See?” he said, holding up his sandwich wrapper and his now-empty drink cup. “It’s exactly one mile away, so I’ve been gone a while.”
    “You could have driven.”
    “If I had my car keys, I’d have my apartment keys.”
    “Why aren’t you wearing shoes?”
    He looked at his feet.
    “I like to walk quietly. You know that.”
    He returned to his apartment a tired but happy man.
    He minimized the file for a bit and went to the Android smartphone app store. With some effort he found a combination of emulators that could pull up the file on his phone. No more walking home, or really, anywhere.
    He had one more item on his mental to-do list.
    He spent quite a while searching before he found the fields for the date and time. He was past being surprised to find these entries in forms he could easily understand. He figured the program had just passed these concepts on to the people it created as a short cut. Why spend cycles creating new notation systems when it can just give people ones it already knows will work and get on with rendering trees?
    He looked at the time notation for a long time. It was, essentially, the world’s most accurate clock. The numbers seemed off until he realized it was Greenwich Mean Time.
    He was going to try time travel. He couldn’t not try, even though he was terrified of the whole idea. He carefully added thirty seconds to the time notation, hit enter, and … nothing happened. He double checked. The time notation hadn’t accepted his input. He tried again, with identical results.
    Martin let out a long breath, and said, “It’s probably just as well.”
    A voice from the corner of the room said, “Try going back in time, not forward.”
    Martin jumped, then looked toward the source of the voice. He saw