Black Magic by Alexis Blakely

Author:Alexis Blakely [Blakely, Alexis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

There is an insane amount of factually accurate information about magic on the internet. It’s sitting right there, waiting for anyone with an open mind and a few choice search words to stumble upon. It is, however, so buried amongst celebrity worship, narcissistic social media, memes, and silly cat gifs; that virtually no one takes any of it seriously. It also doesn’t help that most mages are pretty hardcore Luddites. I call them graybeards; wizards who think they have to look all mysterious and wizened to do magic. Think old-school Merlin types who’re more magic miss than magic missile. Mages like that still filled volumes of leather-bound books with chicken scratch handwriting rather than trust anything to a computer.

The world is changing, though. Some forward-thinking mage nerds in the seventies had seen the potential of sharing knowledge via a rapidly growing network of computers that was changing how information was exchanged. They rallied against the inherent secrecy in our ranks, and they set about building digital libraries containing every scrap of magic history they could find. One of the most reliable knowledge repositories was still hosted on a Tripod account, proudly boasting its optimization for Netscape 2.0. The thing was a horrendous looking piece of crap that was impossible to browse on a phone, but if you scoured the archives long enough, it was possible to learn a few things that had the potential to be pretty dangerous in the hands of an amateur. It was on this very site where, browsing from a public terminal in the downtown library nearly a decade earlier, I’d learned how to cast the energy bolt I’d jolted the kryte with earlier that morning. That first experimental casting was cringeworthy, to say the least. As I’d read the description, my brain had begun working through the mental process required to cast the bolt. What I’d intended to be a simple spark directed towards a wad of crumpled paper, had manifested as an electrical surge that had knocked out the entire neighborhood grid. Caution and patience hadn’t been close friends of mine back then. It wasn’t until a poorly cast attempt to light a candle burning away every bit of hair on my body that I’d started taking my experimentation more seriously.

The other problem with arcane lore websites was that none of them were indexed for search. A search engine like Google or Bing has crawlers that scan every bit of data on every public-facing network around the world, but a single line of code in a robots.txt file could stop those crawlers from adding your content to a search engine’s database. While the people who’d set these sites up in the first place had been all about the open exchange of magic knowledge, they hadn’t been all too keen on broadcasting its availability to just anyone out in the wider world. It was there in the open for anyone who knew where to look, yet at the same virtually invisible to the general public.

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