Off to Be the Wizard - 2 - Spell or High Water Read Online Free Page A

of the room. The rest of the room was open and empty. Roy walked around the dining room table and chairs, then stopped and asked where the kitchen was.
    “Don’t have one. We don’t really need to cook. Are you hungry ?” Martin asked.
    “No. Pete gave me some mutton. He said it was on the house.”
    Martin remembered that when he’d arrived, the only thing Pete had given him “on the house” was an assortment of threats and insults.
    Roy moved on to the color-coordinated couch and easy chairs. They were modern, comfortable, and small enough to be easily maneuvered by one man. He slowly walked toward something he clearly didn’t recognize. It was a large, flat slab of black glass and plastic, mounted vertically on a base that sat on top of a wooden cabinet. “What’s that?’ he asked.
    “That’s my TV,” Martin said. He picked up a remote control and aimed it at the slab. It played a little jingle and displayed a spinning Samsung logo. Martin turned it off.
    “There are no TV channels here, of course, but I use it to watch old movies from time to time.”
    Roy turned to Martin, and in a quiet voice asked, “What year are you from?”
    Martin chuckled. “2012. Have a seat, Roy.”
    Roy sat heavily in one of the easy chairs. Martin looked at his closed laptop, thinking he’d give Roy a little more time to adjust before hitting him with that. He got up from his desk and sat on the couch opposite Roy.
    “So,” Martin asked, “what happened?”
    “Huh?” Roy said, snapping out of his daze.
    “What brings you to Medieval England, and how the heck did you manage to find the file in 1973?”
    “Nobody else from the seventies is here?”
    “No. Until you, the earliest year anyone had come here from was 1984, as far as I know.”
    Roy puffed up a bit. “So I found it first.”
    “Yes,” Martin said, “but you got here last, so you can decide for yourself what that’s worth.”
    Roy thought about that, then continued. “I was an engineer at Lockheed. It’s a company that makes airplanes.”
    Martin said, “It’s called Lockheed Martin in my time. Always kinda got my attention.”
    “I bet. Anyway, I worked in a division called the Skunk Works.”
    “Really?!”
    “Yeah. We, uh, we mainly did top secret work for the government .”
    “I know!”
    “High-speed, high-altitude stuff.”
    “I know!”
    “Top-secret projects.”
    “I know!”
    “Look, kid,” Roy snapped. “Do you want me to tell you the story, or do you already know it?”
    Martin put his hands up. “Sorry. Please, go on.”
    “Okay. So, back in ’65 we got ourselves a computer. An IBM 360. We didn’t know what the heck we were gonna do with it, but everyone figured those things were the future, so they ordered me to learn how to run the thing. I studied and experimented for a while. The company had a few more of them sitting around in other divisions. All of the magnetic tapes for the whole company were stored in one room. One day, I decide to see what other divisions are using the stupid thing for, so I just start loading up all the tapes in there, one by one. One of the tapes has a file on it that appears to be larger than the tape could hold. That got my attention.”
    “Understandably,” Martin said. “How much could one of those tapes hold?”
    “A hundred and seventy megabytes,” Roy answered. “What’s so funny?”
    Martin said, “Nothing. Please, go on.”
    “Okay, so I load up the file, and I get a print of the first few thousand characters. It looks like a database.”
    “And eventually, you realized what you were looking at.”
    “Yes,” Roy said, “proof that the world, and everyone and everything in it, is just a program controlled by a computer.”
    “And you had a file that could control the computer that controlled the world.” Martin leaned forward and asked, “What did you do next?”
    “I thought about giving myself a bunch of money, but I thought that was probably the fastest way to get