“Technology?” he questioned, the word tasting like copper and ash on his tongue.
“What, pray tell, is this technology?
Is it a form of sorcery, or perhaps a language I have yet to master?” Rykker’s voice echoed in the hollows of Aaron’s mind, sounding more like a vibrating chord than a human tongue.
Aaron gasped, his jaw nearly hitting the floor as he looked around at his dark room.
“You’re serious?
You guys don’t have technology?” He took a breath, trying to simplify a concept mankind had taken for granted since before the Industrial Age.
Aaron said, “Look, technology is just the building and use of artificial devices to solve problems.
It’s a way to bend the world to our will to make life easier.
Instead of relying on muscle, we use ingenuity to build mechanical objects—machines—to act as our tools.”
Aaron gestured vaguely toward the ceiling, not realizing that the General couldn’t see his movements, “We build machines that scrub our clothes until they’re spotless, glass orbs that illuminate our homes at the flick of a switch, and systems that keep us cool in the summer and warm in the winter.
It’s the art of the machine, General—a world where the heavy lifting is done by cold iron and sparks instead of sweat and toil.”
Rykker remained silent for a moment, the concept of a world built by hands rather than wills was feeling dangerously heavy.
On Bartuii, such a concept was alien; there, if one needed light, they sang to the ether, and if they needed warmth, they wove it from the air.
There was no need for machines or this technology the boy spoke of.
“Machines,” Rykker repeated, his tone polite but dismissive.
“We have no need for artificial items.
We use mana.
It is the life force inherent in the air, the water, and the soil.
We draw it in, shaping the environment around us to our will.”
***
The silence in the small room felt brittle, as if Aaron’s next breath might shatter it.
He stood up from the bed, his legs feeling oddly detached from his body, and paced a tight circle.
His scientific mind—a mind built on the rigid architecture of physics and engineering—was currently suffering a catastrophic system failure.
“Wait,” Aaron stammered, his hands carving frantic shapes in the air as if trying to catch the logic drifting away from him.
“Like, actual, honest-to-god magic?
You’re telling me that while my people were perfecting the steam engine and splitting the atom, yours were just… whispering to the wind?”
Rykker corrected, “Mana is not a whisper, Aaron.
It is the pulse of the universe.
We do not need to forge a hammer when the iron itself is willing to take shape.”
Aaron felt a surge of awe battling intense suspicion, a dizzying cocktail of wonder and the nagging fear that he was the butt of an elaborate, interstellar joke.
“So, you don’t build tools to change the environment…
you just force the environment to change itself?
You bypass the laws of thermodynamics because you have a better relationship with the energy source?”
“Mana,” Rykker corrected, his voice a low vibration that seemed to resonate in Aaron’s chest.
“Life force.
It is the blood of Bartuii.
The words hung in the air, heavy and impossible.
Aaron blinked rapidly, his mind struggling to bridge the gap between the cold, hard reality of his upbringing and the shimmering insanity Rykker was spouting.
He looked at his own hands, then said to the General.
“I’ve spent my life studying how things work,” Aaron whispered, his voice cracking with a mixture of terror and a burgeoning, wild excitement.
“If what you’re saying is true, then everything I know is just a footnote in a much bigger, much stranger book of the cosmos.
Don’t just tell me it’s there—make me believe it.”
***
Rykker’s presence descended over Aaron’s mind like a heavy velvet curtain, cold and suffocating.
Inside that internal void, Rykker paused to survey the silence.
It was a wasteland—hollow and empty.
Could he even manifest his power here?
“Show you?” Rykker’s voice echoed through the subconscious chamber, dripping with disdain.
“I am a wielder of mana, a Grandmaster of the arcane and a General of legions.
Do not insult me by asking for tricks.”
“Okay,” Aaron whispered.
He stared across the room at his desk, fixed on the dark monitor of his PC.
“If you’re really in there—and not just a tumor I need to have cut out—then turn on my computer.”
Rykker let out a low, grinding laugh.
“You think mana is a toy?
It requires intent.
It requires…” He reached out, instinctively grasping for the vibrant, thrumming energy he usually molded to bend steel or ignite the air.
He commanded the mana to surge.
He reached into the depths of the void to pull it forth.
He conjured; he willed; he commanded again.
Nothing.
The Grandmaster’s mental voice spiked with a sudden, sharp panic.
Where is the pulse?
Where is the flow?
In that moment, the terrible truth shattered Rykker’s composure: the interdimensional jump had stripped him bare.
The master of the elements was now a disembodied ghost—a General with no army and a sorcerer with no spells.
“It…
your world is dead,” Rykker stammered, his bravado flickering.
“My mana…
it does not listen here.”
Aaron’s shoulders slumped.
The brief spark of excitement vanished, replaced by a crushing wave of disappointment and the return of the “elaborate hallucination” theory.
“So you can’t do it.”
“I said it does not listen,” Rykker snapped, his voice regaining its cold, commanding edge to mask his fear.
“I did not say it was absent.
Your crude tools are not alive; they are mere husks.
It is your world that is devoid of life, not I.”
***
Aaron, now sitting at his desk, leaned back in his swivel chair, the plastic creaking in the silence of his room.
He wasn’t convinced that earth was ‘dead’.
Instead of panic or awe, his mind shifted into scientific theory, a clinical detachment, someone trying to debug a broken piece of code.
“The ‘dead world’ theory is a convenient excuse, General,” Aaron said, his voice flat.
“But if you’re as smart as you claim to be, you’d realize that doesn’t hold up.
Physics still works.
So why don’t you?”
Aaron tapped a pen against his desk, his eyes narrowing as he began to dissect the General’s inability to use magic.
“I’ve been thinking about it,” Aaron continued.
“There are three reasons why you can’t generate mana, and none of them involve my world being a wasteland.”
He held up one finger.
“Theory one: Frequency.
Magic in your world might not be a ‘substance’ you pull from the air, but a specific vibration, a wavelength perhaps.
For example, If you’re a radio tuned to FM and this world is broadcasting in AM, you’re not going to hear anything.
You’re reaching for a handle that isn’t there because your ‘mana’ and our ‘matter’ are vibrating on different planes.
You’re trying to grab a shadow with a physical hand.”
He held up a second finger.
“Theory two: The Interface.
This is my favorite.
Magic might be a biological function—like a muscle or a gland.
In your world, you had the hardware.
You had the materials within your body to cultivate and conjure mana.
But right now?
You’re a ghost in a machine that doesn’t have your software.
You’re trying to run a high-end graphics program on a calculator.
My body doesn’t have the organs to process mana, so even if you command it, the signal never reaches you.”
Aaron paused, his gaze darkening as he reached the final conclusion.
This was the one that made his skin crawl.
“But then there’s theory three,” Aaron whispered.
“The most logical one.
You aren’t you anymore.
You’re a spirit, General.
A consciousness that’s been stripped of its anchor.
In your world, you were able to generate mana because you had a body.
But you didn’t bring that body with you.
You’re an interloper occupying my headspace.
You can’t manifest power because you don’t actually exist in this dimension—only your thoughts do.
You’re like a gamer trying to move a character when the controller is unplugged.
You have the will, but you’ve lost the physical tether required to exert force on the world.”
Aaron looked at his computer screen, then back at the empty air.
“You’re a pilot without a cockpit.
And until you figure out how to bridge that gap, you’re just a very loud, very annoying passenger.”
You can’t tell I’m a science major and a magic enthusiast, can you?
Is my nerd showing?
or maybe it’s my geek today?