"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
- One of the 3 Laws of Clarke patented by Arthur C. Clarke, my favourite science fiction author responsible for works such as A Space Odyssey and The Fountains of Paradise.
My name is Isaac Mun. As a teenager, I'd clung to those words like a prophecy. Back then, magic wasn't just fairy tales—it was a promise. A promise that the universe held secrets waiting to be unraveled, that the mundane could crack open to reveal wonder. But Clarke's third law cuts both ways. What if the magic isn't out there at all? What if it's just… us?
Deluding ourselves, dressing our ignorance in robes and incantations, pretending the gaps in our understanding are doorways rather than voids? I used to love magic. Not the cheap card tricks or rabbit-in-a-hat illusions, but the kind that lived in the pixelated glow of an old shitty made RPG —Elenos Arcane Academia: The Legend of the Light.
I'd stay up past midnight, hunched over my handheld console, guiding my wizard avatar through trials of elemental mastery. The game's lore whispered that magic was just science not yet explained, a mantra I carried into adulthood like a talisman. When reality—with its student loans and parental expectations—nudged me toward practicality, I told myself quantum physics was the closest I'd get to real sorcery.
What a joke.
Now, at 2:47 a.m., in a dorm room that smells of stale ramen and distraught, I choke on the fine print of that promise. My tablet glows like a malevolent artifact, equations swimming across its surface: Schrödinger's wave functions, Feynman diagrams, the Hamiltonian operator laughing in cursive script.
The numbers blur. My eyes burn. Somewhere beneath this landfill of half-annotated PDFs and coffee-stained problem sets is a wooden desk, purchased second hand by my roommate back when he still asked, "How's the lectures bro?" instead of, "When are you gonna drop that subject bro?"...
"I miss my friends…"
I let my forehead thud against the desk. A loose pencil rolls into the abyss between my physics textbook and the one escape I still allow myself—a dog-eared copy of Hyperion, its cover creased from being shoved into bags between lectures.
Dan Simmons' Shrike could eviscerate a man in seconds, but even that horror feels quaint compared to the gauntlet of tomorrow's exam. Quantum Field Theory: Midterm. The words alone make my stomach twist.
"Some shut eye would be nice,"
I mutter, voice hoarse from hours of silent screaming.
But my brain, ever the tyrant, fires back: Sleep is for the unambitious. For the weak. Or maybe that's Dr. Varma's voice, her crisp accent echoing through last week's lecture hall:
"True understanding requires sacrifice, Mr. Mun. Everything is a probability amplitude until the waveform collapses."
I push upright, the room tilting like a ship in a raging storm. My legs sway, numb from hours of inertia. The fridge—a graveyard of caffeine and regret—is six steps past the kitchenette. Six steps through a labyrinth of sleep deprivation.
I count them aloud, clinging to the rhythm:
"One. Two."
The third step catches the edge of my rug, nearly sending me face-first into a poster of the Standard Model.
"Three."
My reflection glares back from the microwave's dark surface—pale, hollow-eyed, a ghost in a hoodie.
"Four."
The overhead light flickers, a stutter in the simulation.
"Five."
The sixth step never comes.
Instead, cold metal bites into my palms. A railing. Moonlight, sharp and silver, floods my vision. When did I open the balcony door? The campus sprawls below, a circuit board of streetlights and shadows. I'm on the 36th floor. The air tastes like winter.
"Huh…?"
It happens in slow motion. My elbow brushes the railing—a careless nudge, really—but my body's already tipping, center of gravity surrendered to exhaustion. For a heartbeat, I'm weightless.
Then I'm falling.
Wind screams past my ears, but the world… quiets. The city transforms into a constellation, its chaos resolving into patterns. Neon signs bleed into starlight. A train snakes through the dark like a luminous serpent. It's beautiful, I think, and the clarity terrifies me. How many nights had I wasted, hunched over textbooks, blind to this?
"Terminal velocity…"
My mind murmurs, ever the pedant.
"9.8 m/s². Roughly 196.34 km/h. At 36 floors, time to impact—"
The calculations dissolve. So this is how it ends. Not with a Nobel or a breakthrough, but a footnote in tomorrow's campus news. Tragic Accident. Overworked Student. Mental Health Resources Available Here
I close my eyes.
The irony isn't lost on me. I'd chased the secrets of the universe, only to crumble beneath their weight. All those hours trying to parse the paradoxes—particles that exist nowhere and everywhere, entanglement spitting in causality's face—and the biggest mystery is why I ever thought understanding would save me.
Clarke was right. We're all just apes gawking at the monolith, mistaking its edges for the whole. I wanted to soar, I wanted to grow wings. And like Icarus, I fall, melted. Not from the heat of the sun but the science behind its glow.
The ground rushes up.
Null—
Silence.
Then… light.
But not the sterile fluorescence of labs or the anemic glow of screens. This is liquid light, golden and thick, pouring into me like a solvent. In theory, light is both a particle and liquid. But I feel it in my ribs, my veins, dissolving the inertia of a thousand all-nighters.
Wait."
I have ribs. Veins. A body.
My eyes snap open. Shattering the improbable barrier of black. The non-zero probability void between worlds.