A Wizard Alone

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In a living room of a suburban house on Long Island, a wizard sat with a TV remote control in his hand, and an annoyed expression on his face. “Come on,” he said to the remote. “Don’t give me grief.”

The TV showed him a blue screen and nothing more.

Kit Rodriguez sighed. “All right,” he said, “we’re on the record now. You made me do this.” He reached for his wizard’s manual on the sofa next to him, paged through it to its hardware section — which had been getting thicker by the minute this afternoon — found one page in particular, and keyed into the remote a series of characters that the designers of both the remote and the TV would have found unusual.

The screen stayed mostly blue, but the nature of the white characters on it changed. Until now they had been words in the Roman alphabet. Now they changed to characters in a graceful and curly cursive, the written form of the wizardly Speech. At the top of the screen they showed the local time and the date expressed as a Julian day, that being the Earth-based system most closely akin to what the manual’s managers used to express time. In the middle of the blue screen appeared a single word:

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