The New Magic - The Revelation of Jonah McAllister - Landon Wark (bill gates best books TXT) 📗

are several parts of this spell that are pretty important. One part in particular, if you mess it up you can cause scorch marks on your table. And for that reason we don't recommend you do this on, say, your hand, or around flammable materials."

He went on, expounding each section of phonemes and presenting several coins that had come out either without markings or deformed edges.

Raymond's eyes remained open as the sun crept over his pale face. He felt sick. Not from the hangover.

There was a smaller version of the pen he had used to write out the... spell(?!) sitting on his table. It was incomplete, missing the metal clip and only about seventy percent of the size, but the one in the third video had been a perfect replica and...

Who the fuck is going to buy pens? The thought interrupted, breaking into his brain with irresistible force.

The stationary market was going to tank! He made a mental note to tell his broker to sell every last one of his shares of Staples.

He rolled over in his bed as he ticked down the list that Bob had listlessly rolled over the day before: Produce. Automotive. Sell all of those too. Except real-estate. They couldn't make a whole building, could they? Muppets still needed money to pay rent... Jesus Christ the currency markets! He was going to have to find out where this stuff was happening and sell anything, everything. And what was going to be left? There was a big pile of money coming his way... Until it all got diluted away by a flood of fakes... or bought things that could just be... made... summoned(?)... conjured(?).

His limited imagination struggled to come up with what the world would look like if this thing kept spreading.

This townhouse would not exist... Well, it would, but... the girls at the strip club wouldn't... and no security... No keeping out the fucking muppets!

What good was everything if some muppet could just put his hands all over it? If they could have it without paying?!

Ray rolled out of his bed, hitting the floor hard and suffering a wave of nausea. Fuck that. Fuck that.

For a moment he considered just bowing out. Hide under a blanket for a few years.

And just let the muppets win? Fuck that. Fuck that.

This world, his world was a gradient, a food chain and desire was its hunger. Hell, desire was the human spirit. Get rid of that and... the world would start dying. No work. No money. No distinction between him and the soulless, ambitionless muppets that flooded the world.

He caught a look of himself in the glass of the window. He was no muppet! But, the day when he would be was beginning to take shape on the edges of that limited imagination. A horrendous pit formed in his stomach as he saw his eyes become a little dimmer.

He stood up and staggered over to his laptop, head throbbing with a single thought. Somehow the regional muppets had managed to keep this shit offline for at least three weeks. There were all sorts of execs in China who were churning out all sorts of internet scrubbers. And they could just shut everything down if they needed to. It would mean tanking the economy, absolutely tanking it, but it wouldn't be the first time he had survived something like that. That sort of thing was easy, but it could still get out of hand the old fashioned way. Once there was the scent of free pens in the water the muppets would congregate with their pathetic mouths open.

He did have a few connections in the area. It was a good (only?) place to invest the cash he would have coming his way. There were others out there who would do the same, at least if he made them realize what he had come to realize. There were ways to stop all of this, or at least slow it down until he had managed to have his fun and then bow out.

Take your feet off the stage, as one of his pinko college professors had said.

And after you were off the stage, who cared?

Jonah McAllister Builds an Army

As the video came to an end with a redirection to the documentation links Aegera tossed the tablet onto the nearby sofa, her point made. Jonah's brow wrinkled to the point where she thought he might not be able to see at all.

"There's five videos that were brought to me. So far it's been entirely regional."

"That's surprising," Jonah said.

"Whatever internet blockade the government has up to keep people from posting to international sites is keeping these off too," she said. "The locals' paranoia about news of their civil unrest getting to... well, whoever's gonna give a damn in the world today. But it's only a matter of time before someone manages to get a thumb drive over the border and into a computer."

"Are we causing civil unrest?"

"I—Well, no more than what existed before we arrived. I thought that's why we were in this place. It was in trouble."

"Yeah."

"You—Jonah?"

"Yeah?"

"I'm kind of worried. This place may be in trouble, but I don't think the people here are going to see us as the hope they need, at least not in the way you're imaging."

"How so?"

"I've seen the way some of them look at the cops. Out of the corners of their eyes. I'm getting the feeling that there's not going to be any kind of quiet awakening like you might want." She waffled a little in her mind about the phrasing. "It's great to be able to make bread from nothing, but the reason that some people don't have bread isn't because of some famine or economic instability. It's because someone knocked it out of their hands."

Jonah shook his head slowly. "We've been over