Chapter Three: The Second Law

“So… know any good jokes?”

Mitch looked around carefully before responding. After they were done eating — and Mitch had picked up the check — John had led him back outside and into a nearby alley. It seemed entirely possible that both the question about jokes and the setting were related to Mitch’s ongoing apprenticeship in the ways of magick, but it was equally possible that he was seeing importance where there was none. In short, the only joke Mitch could think of was the one that might be on him.

“Just the really old one about the chicken.”

“Hmmm. Okay, I’ll start. This elderly pastor was cleaning up his office one Friday morning. In the back of the office, he found a small box containing three eggs and a hundred bucks in one dollar bills. He showed his secretary the box and asked about its contents. Embarrassed, she admitted having hidden the box there for the last twenty-five years. Confused, he asked her why. The secretary replied that she hadn’t wanted to hurt his feelings. He asked her how the box could have hurt his feelings. She said that every time that he had delivered a poor sermon, she had placed an egg in the box. The pastor felt that three poor sermons in twenty-five years was certainly nothing to feel bad about, so he asked her what the hundred bucks was for. She said, ‘Each time I got a dozen eggs, I sold them to the neighbours for one dollar.'”

“That sounds a lot like the guy my parents made me go see when I was a kid.”

“Yeah, they’re pretty common. Your turn.”

“A joke? Okay. Let me think for a bit.” Mitch racked his brain for a bit.

“Okay, so a highway patrolman pulled up alongside a speeding car on the freeway. The cop looks in the driver’s window, and he sees this blonde lady knitting. He cranks down his window and yells ‘Pull over!’ at the top of his lungs. She yells back, ‘No! Scarf!'”

“Heh. that’s kind of good. Although when you can change your hair color at will, blonde jokes tend to become moot. Same with ethnic jokes.”

“Ethnic jokes?”

“Yeah, the same principle. Changing bone structure and skin color and all that. Once physical appearance is interchangeable, so are the jokes that use them.”

“What about the jokes that have to do with cultural elements? Like Irishmen drinking, or Frenchmen surrendering?”

“Not my department. I’ve never heard of a culture mage, myself.”

“But it’s possible, yes?”

John shrugged. “All you need is a paradox for a lever and a place to stand.”

“Say what?”

“Paraphrasing what’s his face. One of the early scientists. He said that all you needed to move the earth was a long enough lever and a place to stand.”

“I think that was Archimedes.”

“I actually thought it was Galileo.”

“Could be. Galileo was more into gravity research though. Archimedes was into mechanical applications. He invented that screw thing. That spiral at an angle. Used for moving water.”

John scratched the stubble on his chin. “Hmmm. Which one came first?”

“I dunno. I want to say Archimedes. But I might be thinking of that one student of Socrates or Plato, began with an A.”

“Aristotle?”

“That’s the one.”

“Well, yeah, HE probably came before both of them. But he probably didn’t do any actual science or technology. The Greeks of the time were into philosophy.”

“Yeah. Lazy bastards.”

“And backwards bastards too, from what I’ve heard. There’s this guy in, I think it was Florida? He says that the Platonic Scale, or his forms or something, the abstracts? You know what I’m talking about? He says Plato got it backwards. The particular doesn’t come from the abstract. You get the abstract by taking all the particulars and finding the average.”

“Sounds like how software compression works. Like in a JPEG-”

A man walked into the alleyway, knocking over a beer bottle a few inches away from the corner of the building. John spun around and seemed to shrink half a foot as he adopted a fighting stance. Almost immediately he relaxed.

“Dammit Doc. I wasted some perfectly good adrenaline on your clumsy buttocks.”

The man shrugged and headed into the alley. “I thought the body could make more of that stuff?”

“It can. But it’s the principle of the thing.” John reached out and hit the man’s fist with his own in a complicated pattern that probably evolved out of the handshake. “Mitch, this is the notorious Dr. Vague. Doc, this is Mitch. He knows the score, or at least what teams are involved in the game.”

“Nice to meat you Mitch. I see you’ve gotten ensnared in John’s wiles.”

“Yeah, if that’s what they’re calling them these days.”

***

Dr. Vague’s truck, like the man and the whole Occult Underground, was awash in contradictions. It’s rusted and dented exterior contradicted the smooth and steady run of the engine, and the large and spacious bed was in contrast to the cramped cab. Mitch wondered if he was getting used to the situation, or if John somehow made himself skinnier.

“So what’s the word?”

Dr. Vague shrugged. “I’ve only been out a week or two, but I found a few leads. You heard of a guy named Doubting Thomas?”

“Not really.”

“He’s a real know it all. Photographic memory, speed reading, always keeping his eyes and ears open. I’m thinking he might be able to recognize the workmanship on the scrap.”

“What are you guys talking about?”

“Doc, you want to tell him?”

Dr. Vague shrugged almost like he didn’t care, but Mitch was quick to note his knuckles were turning white, as though he was trying to choke the steering wheel to death.

“A few years ago, my wife went out to put the trash out at the curb. I heard screaming… violent noises… when I went out, there was a dead man in the street and my wife was lying on the sidewalk, bleeding from the throat. She was gone before the paramedics even got there. The police thought it was a freak murder suicide, because the guy in the street, his throat was slit too. But they didn’t see what I saw.”

Mitch wasn’t sure what would happen if he pressed the issue, but his curiousity had been triggered.

“What did you see?”

Dr. Vague’s eyes narrowed to slits. “A little metal gizmo, about the size and shape of the business end of a weedwhacker. Worked about the same way, too. Flew around. I thought it was going to come after me, but there was a whistle from ANOTHER guy in the street. Didn’t see him very well, but I did see one eye glowing. The flying gadget flew back to him and he ran away with it. Ever since then, I’ve been fixing to get my revenge on that murdering cocksucker. And I’m finally making progress. John, you want to fill him in? The traffic’s getting a bit tricky on me here.”

“Sure thing. About six months ago, Doc found one of those flying attack machines. They’re clockworks. You know what those are, right?”

“If you’re talking about department store mannequins dressed in jungle camo that make ticking noises and try to punch you when you make any sudden moves around greasy old Italian men, then yeah, I know what clockworks are.”

“It was smashed and didn’t work, but it was almost totally intact. Since clockworkers tend to have a certain style or decorative sense, a knowledgeable eye can tell you who made a specific machine. Or at least give you a lineage to choose from.”

“A lineage?”

“Yeah. It’s kind of standard for clockworkers these days to just hand the skills down, father-to-son. If they’re lucky enough to marry.”

“So you’re taking this scrapped attacker to a guy called Doubting Thomas, so he can look at its shape and size and metal composition and tell you who made it, so you can go fertilize the lawn with his brains?”

Dr. Vague shrugged. “Something like that.”

“Can I watch?”

***

After a hair-raising commando-style parking brake stop at roughly 40 miles per hour, Dr. Vague got out of the truck. Mitch was already out of the passenger side, looking for something to hold onto. John hopped out last and slammed the door.

“That was too slow Doc. You’re losing your edge.”

“Har har har. Look, you want to wait out here while I talk to the guy?”

“Sure. If you need us just start yelling all the swear words you know.”

“That could take hours.”

After Dr. Vague knocked on the door and was admitted by a thin, pale man dressed in subdued earth tones, John turned to Mitch.

“I guess now is as good a time as any for the next part. We’ve talked about a logical paradox frame, right?”

“Jiu Jitsu for reality. Yeah. I remember.”

Actually, most of what Mitch was remembering was the spicy food and spicier sauce at the restaurant before the reckless driving.

“Well, that on its own is just a frame. It looks nice on your coffee table, yes. But it doesn’t do that much. Actually, on its own it does jack shit.”

“And I want this on my coffee table WHY, if it’s going to shit everywhere?”

“That’s just it. If it’s left alone, it’s pointless. It’s theory without any practical applications.”

“So what do we need for applied magick?”

“A demonstration. A premise the theory can use to link itself to the physical world. Or possibly the metaphysical. It depends on exactly where you stand when the spell is cast. The paradox frame is kind of like those tournament charts for sports teams, where you follow certain branches in and certain branches out.”

“I thought that was just to show who ended up where after a game. It didn’t have any intrinsic rules.”

John frowned and rubbed his forehead. “Sure, go ahead, make things harder for me.”

“Alright. How about you explain it in Pig Latin?”

“Ha. Ha. Another Ha. Think of it this way. In order to get out of the truck, you had to exchange positions — one outside the cab and one inside the cab. You couldn’t be two places at once… well, you COULD, but let us assume for the moment normal cause and effect gets the vote. In order to obtain your position outside the truck, you had to give up your position inside. Thus your actions were an exchange. A trade off.”

“…uh huh.”

“In order to create an environment where a stab wound healed over within seconds or the muscles and ligaments behind the face can be stretched without tearing, you have to give up something else. What is it?”

Mitch tried to think past the nausea. It was fading, but very reluctantly, and eventually he was able to concentrate on the problem presented to him.

“You would have to sacrifice the reality where you couldn’t do those. You’d have to do something else, some sort of intermediate stage. You can’t just use the paradox theory. You need… need something.”

“You’d need proof.”

“Yes. That’s it. The paradox shell around realities is just a bunch of variables. X and Y and Z and so on. You need to fit numbers into…”

Mitch had been pacing and looking at his feet as he thought out loud. Without explaination or fanfare, his movement and speech slowed quickly. There were some drops of a red substance, definitely blood, on the driveway Mitch was certain were not there earlier. Quite certain in fact, for two reasons. The first was that he had looked at those spots where the blood had fallen very carefully when he first got out of the truck, since he was still unsure as to the ultimate fate of his stomach contents.

The second was the blood drops were still bright red and shiny. That only happened when it was fresh.

Mitch looked up.

John had pulled out a butterfly knife with strange symbols written on the handles, and pressed the point into the skin with enough force to penetrate it. He slid it back and forth, creating a shallow but noticeable wound on the back of his left arm.

Mitch averted his eyes from the cut and looked at John’s eyes. They were clearly engrossed in the self-mutilation and did not appear to register any physical pain at all. Mitch tried to say something vaguely witty, a half-assed comment like “doesn’t that hurt?” but all that came out of his mouth was a dry croaking noise. He licked his lips and tried again.

“Does that hurt?”

Close enough.

“It’s not so much a question of if it hurts or not, but rather, do I care.”

“Do you?”

“Not a lot.”

The arm that was not mutilated — at the moment, anyway — pulled out John’s wallet and a deft thumb pulled out a large adhesive bandage sandwiched between two five dollar bills. John cleared off the excess blood with his tongue, forcibly reminding Mitch of an animal licking its wounds, and pressed the patch on.

“I now have my momentum. My impetus. The mystical energy that makes the whole thing work. Not only is there a frame in my head that says “Injury Therefore Control”, there’s one in tandem with it waiting to be finished.”

“Errr…”

“Okay, okay. Third times the charm, right? In order to get cells to do anything, you need energy. Energy from food and air and stuff. And there’s an electromagnetic current and field effect around the brain and nervous system. Energy. All I’ve done is change the chemistry of my body through injuring it. It’s releasing special neurotransmitters and hormones. I’m quite literally high right now.”

“Wait, I read about this. The brain is like a superconductor, isn’t it? So your change in blood chemistry decreases resistance somehow?”

“Yeah, and I assure you, you need to leave it at somehow. Don’t try to figure out logical effects. Not using normal logic, anyway. It’ll just make your head hurt. So now you have excess energy running around your body you can twist to your will, if you know how. You’ll know it when you feel it. It’s like miniature lightning bolts running up and down your spinal cord.”

“How fun.”

“Now, you can make this energy do a lot of things, but there is one thing beyond your abilities. You can’t use it to repair the damage you did to gain the power in the first place. It’s the snake-eating-its-own-tail problem.”

“Or using the premise to refute itself.”

“Yeah. So be sure to study up on first aid and especially alternative medicine. And I’ll tell you why just as soon as that Thomas guy stops standing behind me trying to eavesdrop.”

Mitch blinked and leaned to the side. The pale, skinny man Dr. Vague had met earlier was indeed standing behind John. The mage turned around and looked down at the eavesdropper, who was at least a foot shorter.

“Do you also seek mastery over skin and blood and lymph nodes?”

“Not as such, no.”

“Then these words are not for your ears. Come back when you are ready to transcend the laws of reality and harangue the multitudes from a cardboard box.”

Thomas seemed to consider this for a second. “Actually, when you harangue multitudes, you’re supposed to stand on a soap box.”

John hitched his thumbs into his jeans pockets.

“Cardboard box is what I said, and so cardboard is the substance of note. John has spoken, so shall it be. Right Mitch?”

As luck would have it, Mitch was trying to figure out how to harangue multitudes from a cardboard box, which didn’t seem strong enough for the task. “Huh? Sorry man, I wasn’t listening.”

John looked up and raised an eyebrow. He seemed about to say something when Dr. Vague came out of the house, carrying a map and a yellow legal pad and grinning the grin of a shark on many illegal performance enhancers.

“John! We got him! Or I got him. Or WILL get him. This is just what I was looking for! To the Vaguemobile!”

“Vaguemobile?”

John looked at Dr. Vague, then at Doubting Thomas, then at Mitch. While glancing at the truck, he held up his hand and did some counting with his fingers.

“Mitch? In the back.”

“Wait, WHAT? The way he drives?”

“Hey, my driving is distilled automotive excellence. I just have problems with stopping.”

“You know, you could describe an awful lot of CAR ACCIDENTS as having trouble with stopping!”