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

down into each other's muddy waters? Fine. You want to know something about me... Uhhhh... Once I crapped my pants on a carnival ride. I wasn't even as young as you'd like. I was fourteen."

Aegera rolled her eyes again. "All right. If it gets you into brain-working mode. I more regret that I felt the need to do it."

His brow creased.

"I... uh, well, this whole thing was a medical necessity. At least if I wanted to keep up with Jonah. I tried to take care of myself, but my whole... body just wasn't going to listen. The vanilla milkshake thing is a side effect."

"Ah. A pleasant side effect?"

Her lips pursed and she broke eye contact in favour of a less interrogative view out of the window. "I mean, yes and no."

"Oh yeah? I know a few little crumpets who would give their eye teeth for—" He waved his hand again.

"Well... It's just that I was the way I was for so long and this just happened so quickly that I'm not sure I know how to be... this way. I almost threw up the first time I tried recruiting out of a nightclub here. When you're growing up they tell you that it doesn't matter what's on the outside, but what's on the inside, you know. There's stories about how good looking people are secretly terrible."

"Sure. Not exactly right, izzit?"

"No. Good looking people get good treatment. They don't have the same hills to climb. Same with rich people. I don't know, I just got to the point where I just couldn't believe that this was my one and only life and this was the person I was going to have to spend it as."

Tom started. "That's pretty dark for you, Aggy."

"Yeah. I just... needed to get out of that life. Be a different person. Does that make sense?"

Tom ran a finger along the edge of the window. "It does, Aggy."

"And now, anything is possible... copyright Jonah McAllister. And I'm sitting in a crappy restaurant with you talking about my fat shame."

Tom leaned his chest into the table, his black rimmed eyes coming uncomfortably close to her face.

"And I told you about my poop shame. From now on, the two of us are shame sisters."

Aegera felt her eyes widen. "Great..."

"All right, so anyway, we've got our little fireworks display, right? Now, I was thinking that would make a ballin' distraction if we need one."

Down below the limits of human vision and past the realms of cells and macromolecules into where even a small protein would be considered massive, a small window opened up onto the vista of the unseen. This window bore a startling similarity to the scattering field Jonah McAllister had first developed to avoid detection by the primitive surveillance cameras in the hospital months earlier. He had refined his technique since then, now able to intercept (or rather, not intercept) a small field of electrons. By using his ability to super-cool the field he could eliminate naturally occurring fluctuations and working backwards from the electron wavelength use the omissions in the field at a variety of angles to create a representation he could see.

Jonah inhaled slowly in the midst of the long procedure to chill the small field to as close to absolute zero as he could possibly make it.

He pulled back instinctively as the air even where he sat became intolerable. Memories of home overcame him for a moment before he realized that he only had a moment to make use of the cold.

Extending his hand into the intolerable zone and keeping his eyes, wincing in the pain running up his arm, on the shimmering air. The noise was visible, but tolerable. He could find some way to filter it out in subsequent experiments. He just needed to see.

The world shuddered within the field and he could just barely make out the interference patterns made by the electrons bouncing away from the newly birthed coin within. The noise obscured the finer gradations. He bit his lip and mustered his resolve, pushing his hand farther into the cold, hoping for a better signal to noise. The coin shimmered and faded from existence. Better. His nerves ached and burned as he pushed even further in. Another coin. He winced and pulled his arm out, plunging it into the bucket of warm water he had set beside himself. His white fingers flexed in a desperate bid to get blood to return.

The interference pattern played out in front of him, points in the three dimensional blob of light in front of him.

Jonah exhaled as the feeling started to return to his fingers.

He had just seen (screw it) magic's effect on the universe.

And if he could see it he could create a machine to replicate it.

Everyone Breaks

It was a rule as old as the art itself.

Sasha Barsi walked, coffee in hand, down the corridor of the decrepit government offices with little purpose. Over the years whatever zeal was left in him from his youth had been taken. Now only the obscure rituals remained. When he had first joined he was a man confident in the purpose of government work.

Now all that was left was the grim certainty that he was doing little more than propping up a decaying structure of tired oligarchs and their spoiled spawn. But he still went through the motions for reasons he couldn't quite pin down.

Maybe he was hoping that someday he would look up and all the goals he once saw would have been restored without him noticing. Maybe it was because the pay was at least semi-decent. Maybe it was because he didn't really care to begin with and had just fooled himself into thinking he had once had ideals.

The offices in the front buzzed with activity, whipping and beating the bureaucracy into some kind