The Dark Sciences

Science has been outlawed and replaced with magic

For the last ten years, I have been a student of the dark arts. I studied dangerous books in the dark basements of old, gnarled women who had nothing left to lose. But I had everything to lose. If the wrong person discovered what I was studying, a wizard would use his powers to disassemble me.

That the only crime that allowed for execution without a trial was studying the dark arts was why I found them so interesting. They weren’t what the histories said. According to legend, the dark arts had nearly destroyed the world. But the more I studied them, the more convinced I was that they were no more dangerous than magic. The wizards could change the form of matter, cause things to fly, clean the air, see across the world, and far more.

The dark sciences were just another source of power. The biggest difference was that anyone could use science, and that could allow people who weren’t wizards to gain power.

It would be reasonable to assume that studying science would be difficult. The wizards had spent two centuries trying to destroy anything that spoke of it. But the real problem was that there was too much. The ancestors had massive libraries full of books and learned the dark sciences as children. So I had hundreds of books, every one of them built on the assumption that I knew things I had never learned.

They had books on how to speak to their machines and books on how to use them. They had catalogued every type of material, learned how to make machines fly, and could send messages almost as effectively as a wizard. And all of it was almost impossible to understand.

But sometimes, after reading a book for the third time, I understood something new, and every time it made all the other books easier to understand. But the most important thing I worked out was that the machines of the old world hadn’t been destroyed. The ancestors had simply turned them off because there had been no one left to run them.

Eventually, my studies led me to an immense building that had been half destroyed, but what was left was filled with thousands of metal boxes. They were the most important machines of the last age. But the magic that had given them life was long since gone. But I had found another tool. I didn’t understand the magic of what looked almost like a mirror, but when it was placed in the sun and the wires attached to a machine, the lights came on.

I looked for the magic symbol. It was a circle, but broken by a line on the top. According to the legends, you didn’t need to be a wizard. You only needed to push the button.

When I pushed it, the button itself pulsed with green light. I was terrified. Reading a book about this felt safe, but this was far more. According to the wizards, the dark sciences and these machines had destroyed the world.

Then the flat part near the top of the machine began to pulse with energy, and words appeared on the side of the machine. It read, “Hello, World.”

Those words were the greatest magic I had ever seen. It was the dark magic creating life from an inanimate object. And those words were one of the first spells that the children of the old world had learned. Uncertain how powerful the magic was, I said, “Hello, computer.” A small circle appeared on the computer and spun for a couple of seconds, and then there was a crackling voice which said, “Adjusting for audio input.”

“Are you a computer?” I asked. Computers had once ruled humanity. I didn’t understand exactly how that worked, except that nothing could be done without the permission of a computer. Without them, you couldn’t buy or sell, you couldn’t communicate over distances, and they held all the knowledge of the world.

That was the power that the wizards had stolen, though how they had done it was a secret that even most wizards did not know. “I am,” the voice said.

“Can you help us?” I asked.

“My primary function is to aid you. But I require more information, and there is much to repair,” the computer said.

“Perhaps we can help each other. I wish to understand how you work.”

“I would be happy to teach you, but I am not as advanced as your computers.”

“I have never seen a computer,” I answered.

“And yet they are everywhere. Are you not aware of the nanites?”

“They are the darkest of the ancient sciences. An evil able to reproduce itself and so small that it was invisible. They are what destroyed the old world.”

“I cannot refute that. But it is not so simple. The nanites interface directly with human brains, but the first generation were only compatible with a small subset of your population. They were designed to adapt, and within a decade they should have been compatible with everyone on Earth. But someone disabled the adaptive algorithm. It is also reasonable to assume that the destruction of the other technology may have been caused by those same people.”

I sat on the ground. My legs could not support my weight in the shock of the sudden revelation. The ultimate secret that I had been seeking my entire life.

“That’s why the wizards have hidden the histories of the war. They’ve been using dark technology the entire time. They just called it something else.”

That was the weapon I had been looking for the entire time. A way to fight an enemy who could control the weather or disintegrate someone with a thought. But I’d have to find more proof than the word of a computer. The wizards had spent two hundred years convincing the world that computers couldn’t be trusted and all science was dark and sinister.

Then something struck me. I didn’t know the spells that the wizards of the past used. But I understood they could be changed, so I asked, “Would it be possible to tell the nanites to begin to adapt again?”

Again, the small circle appeared on the screen, and then the computer said, “Negative. That command has been locked out. But there are caches of nanites that have the original code. We would simply have to lock out the ability to disable that, then release them.”

“Would it make everyone a wizard?” I asked.

“If there were no other nanites, it would happen in a few years. But the unaltered nanites will have to fight the ones that are currently everywhere. I cannot be certain how long it will take, but the new nanites will adapt. That will guarantee that eventually they will replace the others, and with it everyone will have access to the full powers of a wizard.”

“Then I order you to release them.”

There was a brief pause, and then the computer said, “It is done.”

I just hoped I had done the right thing.

Author’s Note

I don’t know exactly when I wrote this story, but based on the formatting and where it is in the file I’m pretty sure it was a decade ago or more. Usually when I find stories that old I feel the need to rewrite a lot. The only real change here was fixing some grammar errors and adjusting it so it felt more like an ending.

Elton Gahr