Short Story

Magic sucks

The event changed all of our lives.  Not for the better nor for the worse.  But it definitely changed things for everyone.  What caused the event no one really knows, but their are plenty of theories out there.  One popular theory is that God died.  When God died, all the rules of our reality where flushed down the drain. Another popular theory is that one of those large super colliders opened a rift in reality, and all sorts of exotic matter escaped and/or was created.   My favorite theory is that the event was caused by too many people wanting something, desperately believing in one thing.   The world was so bad, that this one thing became the ultimate desire for a dominating majority of the quantum observers in our own little pocket of reality.

Let’s call it the Emerging Observation Theory.

Take a bunch of folks.  Idiots, every single one of them.  Take some more folks, who are smart, but just enjoy dumb things.  Then take some more folks, those that like to criticize the first two groups… you know, your common asshole.  If you were to chart these folks out on a line graph,  you may find that you have a bell shaped curve.  A honest to God standard distribution where 68.5% of the people fall within one standard deviation from the center.  Those 68.5% are all people that actually read books. Then take one author, whose writing is palatable to all those folks, and that author creates a story that everyone can identify with and have a personal and emotional connection with.  Say it was about a little kid who found out he was a wizard, and got to go to a magic boarding school and have all these crazy adventures, saving the world time and time again.  Yay for the little whiny fuckwit, he is so special.  I could be him!

Then some asshole says, hey, let’s turn this into a movie.  No.  Wait.  Seven movies.  And those movies, through another stroke of luck, are all wildly successful.   Those movies suck in another section of people that don’t read, but watch movies.  Now you have 95% of the populace.  95%!  (Including all the other countries and translations.) And all of them want magic to be real.  Desperately.  The world sucks.  This imaginary world is so attractive, so much better than reality, that everyone that can think, observe, and process information wants the fantasy to be the reality.

Boom.

It is.  The universe adjusts to a new shared and observed reality.

But, like anything, the lowest common denominator of the sample is what determines the functionable level of the result.    So instead of spells to make things fly, the spells make people half way across the world fart uncontrollably for a few hours.  Instead of spells to protect you from harm, the best spell out there turns all tangerines in the world blue for exactly twelve seconds.  You craft a potion to make you handsome, it makes your grandma’s nipples grow little afro’s.  Things like that.

Magic is real.  And it is terrible.

And the problem with all this?  Its so benign in nature, getting 95% of all observers to reverse it will be impossible.

We are stuck with it.