Welcome.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magic."
It's one of the 3 Laws of Clarke proposed by, well… Of course… Arthur C. Clarke.
My name is Isaac Mun. Once, as a teenager and young adult, I'd follow those words like they were my gospel.
To be fair, he was my favourite science fiction author, responsible for books like A Space Odyssey and The Fountains of Paradise.
For me, Magic wasn't just a fantastical fairy tale, but rather an undiscovered secret of the universe. A secret that proved the mundane reality could rip open to reveal things beyond cognition and logic, and yet, still abiding science and mathematics.
However…
Clarke's Third Law cuts both ways.
What if 'Magic' didn't exist?
What if 'Magic' was advanced technology from a time so far after humanity's extinction?
What if 'Magic' could only be harnessed by extraterrestrials beyond human logic and laws
After all, for science to function:
We must assume that a physical, 3+1D Reality under General Relativity, if not a 10+1D under M-Theory. Must exist. That our human senses are reliable and not fabrications by our consciousness. That logic exists beyond Earth, and the impossible stays that way. Mathematics is a universal concept and not bound by universal concepts. That the future HAS to resemble the past… And not the opposite way around…
So… What if it's just… us?
What if everything humanity has built up to this point was an irrelevancy on our part?
We can't explain why time periods of countable infinity can be experienced in finite time periods with sufficient speed… Hell… Even Kerr Blackholes suggest that time can be trapped forever…
We, as humanity, delude ourselves; the 'Magic' we conjure is but covers for our ignorance in Spells, Wands, and Incantations. We continuously pretend the gaps in understanding are doorways rather than voids…
It's funny…
Who is to say our brains are superior to the universe when it itself is made of 95% of empty space? Factoring in the empty space in atoms and the number of digits needed to write the percentage of empty space in the universe is to write every digit of Kruskal's Tree Theorem.
We might as well be 'empty-skulled' individuals.
And yet… Considering all these nihilistic views…
I, I.M, LOVED Magic.
The Magic that came from a simple source.
The Elemental Thaumaturgy that was developed in a really… really shittily made Story Game / RPG:
Elenos Arcane Academia: The Legend of the Light.
And I carried this idea into adulthood like a talisman.
But reality, with life's student loans and muffled groans (bars). I was eventually nudged toward practicality.
I told myself Quantum Mechanics was the closest I'd get to real sorcery.
⌘
⁂
∞
What a bloody joke.
I, THE. Isaac Wong, now, at 2:47 a.m., in a dorm room that smells of ramen and unwashed clothes.
I'm choking on the dick of that idea.
This fuckass tablet glows like a malevolent artefact, complex equations spread across under my stylus. Schrödinger's wave functions, Feynman diagrams, and the Hamiltonian operator in my shitty handwriting.
The numbers blur, and my eyes burn.
Somewhere beneath this landfill of annotated PDFs and coffee-stained problem sets is a wooden desk, purchased second-hand by my roommate back when he still asked, "How are the lectures, bro?" instead of, "When are you gonna drop that subject, bro?"...
Ah jeez…
My day ones since primary school...
I miss my friends…
Those bloody bums switched to the business course and started trading fucking stocks while networking…
I let my forehead thud against the desk.
A loose pencil rolls into the gap between my physics textbook. Its cover creased from being shoved into bags between lectures.
Next to it? Hyperion. I have no damn time to read this damn book anymore.
Dan Simmons' Shrike could eviscerate a man in seconds, but even that horror feels quaint compared to tomorrow's exam.
Quantum Field Theory: Finals.
URGHHH… Why the fuck am I falling off...
This course couldn't be any worse…
This university life couldn't be any worse…
…
To sleep or not to sleep…
Hmmmm… Some shut-eye really would be nice. But my brain, ever the tyrant, fires back:
Sleep is for the unambitious. For the weak. Or maybe that was Dr Varma's quote?
How does one have such a crisp accent echoing through last week's lecture hall?
Ah... I stayed back to ask. But this bitch.
"True understanding requires sacrifice, Mr Wong. Everything is a probability amplitude until the waveform collapses."
What the fuck am I supposed to infer from that? She's like a weeb that uses anime terms irl but for science.
I push upright, but everything is dizzying. My legs sway, numb from hours of studying. The fridge is six steps past the kitchen entrance.
But it's six steps through a labyrinth of sleep deprivation.
I count them aloud.
"One. Two."
SHI—
Phew.
A rug, out of all the spars, knocking me out would be humiliating.
"Three."
I see myself glaring back from the microwave's dark surface—pale.
Damn~ I really look like shit...
Dark circles under my eyes? Messy ruffled up hair? Shit, get me an Oscar for being a bum.
"Four."
The overhead light flickers.
"Five."
But the sixth step never came.
Instead.
A cold railing is what I touch.
Oh? Someone installed railings in the kitchen?
The moonlight dismissed my thesis. It flooded my vision.
When did I open the balcony door?
The campus sprawls below, streetlights and shadows.
The air tastes like winter.
Ah yeah! It's nearly Christmas!
Right?
Huh? The air?
"Huh…?"
And it happens in slow motion.
My elbow brushes the railing.
Then, my body's already tipping, the centre of my gravity surrendered to my body's exhaustion.
For a heartbeat, I'm weightless.
Then I'm falling from the 36th floor.
Are you shitting me… Wallahi… I'm fucking COOKED!
Wind screams past my ears, but the world.
It's quiet.
The city transforms into a constellation at this speed, its chaos resolving into patterns. Neon signs bleed into starlight. A train makes its way through the dark like a luminous line.
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—"
Hah...
Fuck it. Why am I mathing right now...
The calculations dissolve.
So this is how it ends.
Not with a Nobel Prize or a revolutionary breakthrough, but a footnote in tomorrow's campus news:
"Tragic Accident. As the department of student affairs. As a student body, we want to look out for one another and our own health. Please consult us if you feel the need to speak with someone. We are always prepared for such a discussion. Resources for Mental Health Are Available."
But… It's her who I am worried about.
Of course… Auntie and uncle. Please forgive this disappointment of a son.
But… You… My fiancé… My love…
We should have spent more nights together... We should have done all the things you said you wanted to do earlier.
I wanted to spend my days with you… Genuinely… But now… I wonder what you're gonna think.
I wonder what you would think about the autopsy.
Despair? Disgust? Or would it be sadness?
I'd really hate myself for leaving you alone like this.
My A-
It's guilt even when I say her name before death…
I close my eyes. So be it. Suicide.
The irony.
I chased the secrets of the universe, only to succumb to its language.
All those hours trying to parse the paradoxes with 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.
Arthur C. Clarke was right.
We're all just damn apes gawking at the monolith that is the universe, mistaking its edges for the whole.
I wanted to soar to the top…
But now… I'm my wings are melting…
I fall, literally.
Not from the heat of the sun but the science behind its glow.
The ground finally rushes up.
Null—
Silence.
But then… light.
But not the sterile fluorescence of labs or the anaemic glow of screens.
This is liquid light, golden and thick, pouring into me like a solvent.
In theory, light exhibits wave-particle duality as it is both a particle and a wave.
But this is liquid. This is the kind of light you feel in your ribs, your 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.
I.M. is awake.