A Fog of Magic: Origins

 

If you read in the older stories, the fictions handed down and recopied and retold and even embellished, the word they use is "magic." Making things happen that natural science cannot easily explain, reversing harms, undoing actions: "magic."

It appears I can do this "magic." It isn't like the fairy tales in the ancient libraries though, muttering nonsense words and waving sticks and invoking deities. It requires a significant investment of personal energy. It takes concentration and time. And like the oh-so-unreal Sorcerer's Apprentice and his wayward broomsticks, a practitioner can do it wrong, set in motion events that can turn bad or even disastrous. Magic is useful, yes...but like a spring rain that you need, you can have too much of a good thing.

But if you spend more time in the ancient libraries, you find other things too. Not just the fairy tales or lesson books but engineering texts. Operators' manuals. Dry, academic tomes dusty with disuse, describing a world far, far more sophisticated than the one we live in now, and yet it was the one we live in now.

And amongst these least fanciful books a whole section that seemed to delve into the metaphysical: meditation. Concentration of will, developing your spiritual confidence. Even a couple of extremely esoteric, nearly impenetrable books on psi powers, which I couldn't make much sense of...

...except I could.

The magic I was taught begins and ends with concentration. Proper concentration requires establishing a mental state not too dissimilar from that of dreaming, the drowsy, free-floating, nearly awake dreams of an afternoon nap on a warm, sunny day. You know you're dreaming and can observe the wanderings of your imagination like a spectator. But achieving this dreamy state while maintaining focus on goals is not something you pick up in an afternoon; it takes a few years of training and practice and, like I said, it can go horribly wrong. The spring rains can come and keep coming until every garden washes away.

My father taught me, he and my grandmother. Among their lessons in concentration of will, they also taught me that it will take two generations to teach the next magician, that it always takes at least two generations of magicians to initiate the next one. The talent is partly inborn but there are occasional sports, children of families with no magic who have the capacity despite their parentage. My own great-grandfather was one such.

So it was with something like recognition that I found myself in this section of the library, and struggling to decipher the foreign words of the books around the willpower section. Environmental manipulation? Repercussional forecasting?

Nanomachines? "Machines" I know well enough, but "nano" is a gibberish sound you coo at small babies.

The books are both a blinding light of revelation and an equally dazzling blackness of mystery. Some are so far out of my context that they are nearly a different language. Others, particularly the ones describing guidance of will, I could almost have written myself.

You prepare yourself, set the trance and focus on circumstances and goals. You envision the current state you want to change, and how the changes will look and feel and smell. You do this for quite a long time - sometimes it takes days. And sometimes you have to stay entranced in order to bring the spell to an end, too - spring rains, remember. Usually you don't want to completely upend the way things work. Simply tweaking things is generally sufficient, subtle nudges.

Magic is at its best when you don't realize it's working. There have been some who went in for grand effects, enormous, brash displays of power that rattled everything around them - not least of which, their neighbors. Those kind of magicians don't stay in business for long and sometimes meet a sudden, sharp end.

And there's another section of the library, quite small actually and leading into the peculiar section involving environmental manipulation: "terraforming." This section is the one that set my mind almost on fire.

It turns out that we are not from here. I am, of course, and dozens of generations before me have all been from here. But there was a generation, centuries or maybe even millennia ago, that wasn't. They were from somewhere else.

This book doesn't talk about that other place, not directly. It cites examples taken from the other place but doesn't talk about the place itself. It appears to have been a whole other world and we, humanity, are originally from there. We came to this world so long ago that nobody alive remembers anything else, and being from there, upon arriving here, set out to make here, now more like there, then. What happened along the way that made us forget our own past?

These books are very strange. They are nothing like modern books with their leather, wooden or cardboard covers, pages of sturdy, stiff paper. No. These most ancient of books, in addition to being constructed of materials I can barely even describe, have no dust on them whatsoever. A little raised dam of dust has formed around them on the shelves, but no dust lands on them directly.

At least our language hasn't changed much. I can read these titles well enough, even if the words are strange:

"Terraforming: Bending Circumstances."

"Terraforming: Finer Points and Enduring Changes."

"Human to Machine Interfaces."

"A Fog of Magic: Practical Application of Nanomachines."

That last one seemed especially pertinent, and I took it down from the shelf, opened it, and began to read.

I've learned a lot. I'm sorry I've been away for so long, I've been reading everything I can find and it has been strange stuff, to say the least.

We're the descendants of travelers from a distant star. "Distant" isn't like "distant, it takes three days to walk there." Stars are so far away that the light of the very closest one - just the light - takes about eight years to get here. So the light we're seeing tonight of the Crab's Eye, is eight years old. And I can hardly tell you how fast light is, it just makes the distance that much farther: in a single beat of my heart, a beam of light would go around the world maybe ten times. I wasn't even aware light had a speed. This is distant so far beyond anything we've ever encountered.

Now imagine that you have a kind of vessel that can fly through the sky between stars over distances that long. If I understand the books correctly the trip took lifetimes, and that may have been as many as a hundred generations ago. The timeframe isn't very clear. But we've been here for so long that we've forgotten as a people that we're not from here.

Anyway. Fog of Magic was what really opened my eyes. What it is that I and other magicians can do isn't magic at all - we're infected!

Let me explain: we're not infected with a disease. But there's something special about us, a trait usually handed down in families but it pops up outside sometimes, too, that makes us compatible with nanomachines.

"Nano" means "small." There's no seeing something this small, just accept it: small. So tiny that a single nanomachine could sit on a single grain of sand and have rooms for hundreds and hundreds of other nanomachines next to it. Thousands and thousands. It's like the opposite of the speed of light: the size of nothing.

So what is happening is this: magicians are people with a host of nanomachines already inside them. These nanomachines aren't doing anything to the magicians, they're just there. They listen. The books touch on how this works but I can't understand any of the words at all but I'm reading and re-reading. But the upshot it, the nanomachines inside us can hear our thoughts.

Not our specific thoughts. Not "I'm hungry" or "Alyssa is pretty" or anything like that. But they can pick up a concentrated train of thought.

So you see? That's why it takes a trance! That's why you have to have quiet and concentration and no spell ever gets cast in a single day! The nanomachines inside us hear us concentrating on this one concept and at first just a few are aware of it, and then more and more, and then you can start concentrating on what needs to be done to address it. If you're thinking, "it's really dry this summer" then after a couple of days the nanomachines inside you are all aware that you're concerned that it's too dry - don't ask me how, how do you formulate thoughts? The exact mechanism isn't important, just that it works.

Of course I'd like to know how it works, but how would I figure it out?

But now here's the thing - we don't just have nanomachines inside us. No! They're everywhere. They're in the grass, the soil, the air - everywhere! We inhale them with every breath, piss them out with every trip to the loo. All of us!

And the ones we breathe in, some of them get all the way up inside us to hear what the magicians' nanomachines are thinking about. And then some get breathed back out and pass the message along, and along, and along until all the nanomachines in the area are all aware of what the magician is concentrating on, you get it? A few get in, a few of those pick up the message, a few of those get back out. It's only a fraction of a fraction of a fraction and nanomachines are too small to be smart, it takes a lot of them to even be stupid and if you want them to do something smart, you have to keep thinking about what you want them to do, so you finally get enough in and then back out of you again to be smart about what to do.

So if you've been thinking "it's really dry this summer," naturally you'd progress to "make it rain," if you had any way of making it rain. And so the nanomachines make it rain.

No, I have no idea how they do that.

I do know that shortly after our great-great grandcestors arrived here, there was a terrible plague. We were nearly wiped out but a long campaign by the earliest magicians set their nanomachines against the plague and killed it.

I'm not sure how that works. The story mentions "a particularly virulent native bug" and that the nanomachines "tore it apart on a molecular scale," which sounds like there was some insect that the nanomachines tore into very, very small pieces. But that's how the nanomachines are everywhere in the first place: it was a big controversy, whether to release them into the air and water and everywhere. Apparently a lot of the first people didn't want to do it.

But those first people didn't have a good defense against the plague either, so when it killed them the magicians went ahead anyway. And that's why we still have magicians today: they set the fog of magic loose in the world which saved all of our ancestors, and it persists all around us still.

But here's the thing: once we were so smart, so technologically advanced - that's another word I don't really have all the context for but I think it means something like "good with machines" that we made machines that flew between stars. We made machines so tiny that thoughts are big compared to them. We took on a disease that lives in every animal in this world and simply tore it to pieces - the disease itself! We did all these things.

How is it, then, that we don't remember that anymore? As a people, I mean. We were mighty enough to take on moving between stars as if it were my own sister moving from one house to another, how did we lose that?

I think it was because of the nanomachines themselves. I think, using them in this way to make everything too perfect for ourselves, we don't have to strive anymore. We don't have to struggle very much. We don't have to think very hard.

Maybe that's the real fog of magic.