“Welcome, welcome, come in, come in,” Magi Ooma said as she waved Tress into her small thatched home. “Sit by the fire, stay warm. Long walk from your tribe, your feet must be cold.”
“Thank you, Magi.” Tress ducked her head in bow, her braids tumbling over her shoulders. Her feet were cold actually, something she was not aware of until the old witch mentioned it. Tress sat on a woven mat near the fire, and pulled her tattered gloves from her hands, the last struggling stowaways of snow that hugged her body started to melt in the warmth of the witch’s home.
“None of that, Tress. I am Ooma to you now. Ooma Fallingdrifts was my name when I came to my master all those years ago. His name was Magi Cobem. What you feel now, I felt. I understand how strange this is. A building of wood? With a roof? And it is always in one palce? It does not get rolled with its supports and loaded on a wagon or an beast? It is strange.”
“It is,” Tress nodded. “I don’t understand it all. How do you get your food? Water?”
“All that in time. Tea?” Ooma smiled graciously.
Tress shook her head, and continued to shed her layers. It was cold in the passes this time of year, and the fact that she could only come to the Magi’s hut in the dead of winter made all this even stranger. Ooma walked shakily to a rack of dried leaves and herbs on one wall, gathering leaves and flowers from different plants. She spoke a magic word and the dust from the ground at her feet and in the air around her coalesced into a pot. She dropped the miscellaneous ingredients into the pot, poured water in from the basin at the wall, and with a wave, the pot floated gently over to the fire to rest itself near the hottest coals. Tress noticed the pot turned black before it even settled into the fire. Ooma pulled a some cheese and bread from her larder and sat back down in front of Tress stiffly.
“Hungry?”
Tress shook her head. “Not yet. Still shaking off the cold.”
“It is fierce this year. My measurements so far are making it a record year indeed.”
“Why make me come in the middle of it?” Tress asked as politely as she could. She kept her tone inquisitive, trying not to stray into accusation. Her smart mouth and quick mind had often gotten her in trouble with the elders.
Ooma smiled knowingly at the near miss. “The snow is the best time for an apprentice to join the master. The magic sleeps in the winter. Makes it easier to control in just this small space.”
“What?” Tress said, confused.
“I suppose we can start with the first lesson while our tea steeps,” Ooma shrugged. “A question for you, first. Do you think our kind has always been nomads, following the herds, making our way across these wide lands generation after generation?”
Tress put a finger to her chin, scratching lightly in thought. “I guess I have never thought about it. The ruins are there for a reason, I know. But I guess my ancestors always roamed, and another people made the big places. We avoid them for a reason.”
“No, my child. It was our ancestors that built the big places… tens of generations ago, our kind lived in those big places as a single people. They were called cities. The one closest to here was called Denver.”
“Den-ver? What does that mean?” Tress smiled.
Ooma made a face. “I honestly don’t know. It is just a name.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“You will. In time. That is why you are an apprentice, because you are smart, capable, and most importantly, malleable. That is why you were selected among the tribes, at the last summer gathering. You are here to change your mind.” Ooma said another magic word, and two cups formed in the dust between them. She waved at the pot and it hovered its way from the fire to pour itself into the cups. “Your tea, my child.”
“Thank you, Ma… I mean Ooma. Thank you Ooma.”
“Of course. You will learn all this. You have to. The traditions must continue. You must learn everything so that you can pass it on in your own time…” Ooma took a sip of her tea and grinned. “Ah perfect temperature. Marvelous.”
Tress took a deep breath over the mug and sipped with relish. “This is good.”
“A herb called peppermint. It grows wild in the fields around here. I will show you how to gather it in the summer. The Dust will help of course, but you should always have the knowledge, even if you do not have to do it yourself.”
“Dust?”
“The magic. It only works because of the Dust. It is everywhere, saturating everything. It lives in our clothes, the wilds, even our own bodies. It is everywhere… we are suffused by it. Dust is the beginning, the middle, and the end of our existence.”
“Is it a god?” Tress asked breathlessly.
Ooma laughed. “No more than a spear is a god or a torch is a god. Is your travel sack there a god?”
Tress looked confused. “Uh… no. It is just a bag.”
“Likewise, the Dust is just the Dust. It may seem wondrous what I do with my little movements and uttered commands, but it is all but simple tools. Back to my first question. Why do you suppose our people are nomads of the great plains? Let me lead you further, and assume we were not this way a long time ago, and now we are. Why do you suppose that is?”
Tress furrowed her brow and thought it over. “We were forced to be?”
“Partly correct. We made the choice to be this way. The world was falling apart and the human race was dying. Our ancestors had a couple options. They could secure themselves against the madness, fighting the hordes of starving and sick, and attempted to keep an island of society amongst it all. Or they could dissolve into the hordes, and try to right the horrors from within. Or they could accept the failure of the human race and die.”
“They obviously did not die…”
Ooma tilted her head in agreement. “They did not.”
“They made an island then? The big place called Denver?”
“Ha! Not at all. They chose a great diaspora, teams empowered with advanced technology that would guide the survivors to the next stage in human survival. Our people started as engineers, doctors, scientists. Some of the smartest in the world. They met in a nearby city called Boulder and designed the end and beginning of our species. Some of them came to the city in the last metal birds that carried people, in large sky carts called airplanes.”
Tress’s eyes were wide in both surprise and disbelief. Ooma could see the danger of Tress rejecting the truth. Ooma stretched her hand out and laid a palm on Tress’s arm.
“Do not worry yourself in understanding everything. Small steps. You will understand as you learn. You did not learn to create a water-tight basket in a single day?”
Tress shook her head and let out a rough rattling laugh. “Of course not. It took many tries. Months of them.”
“This is no different. Small steps, many tries. At the end of my life as a Magi, you will be the same as I. You will be the Magi, and you will be able to control the Dust.”
Tress shoved the spade of her shovel into the black earth while Ooma scrabbled on her hands and knees, poking fingers in the trench and dropping seeds in each hole. The spring had come with the winds, and afternoon sun was warm.
“We could use the Dust for this,” Tress sighed in exertion.
“We could. We could do the a lot of things with the Dust. Blot out the sun, create great monsters to kill all living things, poison all the water on the planet. But just because we could do something, does not mean we should. There is something human in the work, it makes us remember that we are a part of this place as it is a part of us in turn. It cares for us, and we have to care for it.”
“The Dust is a tool, no different than this shovel. You said so my first day here. Months ago,” Tress pointed out.
“True.”
“But…”
“But we forgot that we are of this place. When the human race forgot that, we lost ourselves. Did you know that Earth once had over ten billion people on it?”
“What?”
“Take your ten fingers, multiply by ten fingers, and do that seven more times. Then take ten of those. That is ten billion.”
“Impossible number. The plains would be filled with people from horizon to horizon,” Tress said in awe.
Ooma laughed. “I have seen the records myself. It was not as crowded as you would think. Most people lived in the big places… all over the Earth. That was also a part of the problem when the famines began… and then the diseases spread… it was a waterfall of consequences that killed almost all of them. All those children that did not know why or how. Very sad. But our ancestors knew this would happen. They made themselves all powerful.”
“With the Dust,” Tress was starting to understand the diaspora now. It had taken months to dissect the reasons why, but now she was witnessing the truth for what it was. The Earth was sick, it’s people were sick, and the people of the great schools knew that they were the ones that had to save the human race. The human race would never be able to generate the kind of power that they would need to go through the previous history of technological advancement again. There would be no way for the same steps to happen again. The human race was at the end. So they could falter, die, and eke out a survival, or they could create a path for the human race to follow to the next step. That was the purpose of the Magi.
“And that is our biggest secret. Everything is possible with the Dust. Imagine tiny machines, everywhere. Self creating, self fixing, self monitoring in our air, our earth, our water. Healing the planet by tiny degrees over millennia, waiting for the human race to catch up. And in the meantime, we use it to perform miracles and transfer knowledge. Like so.” Ooma waved a hand, and spoke her magic words. “Open Interface. Audible output, range ten feet from my location.”
A murmuring woman’s voice rose from the dirt and air around Tress and Ooma. “Understood, User Ooma.”
“Create new user,” Ooma said, poking another hole in the dirt mound, dropping a seed. Meanwhile, Tress stood stock still as if a bear stood downwind.
“New user created. Name profile,” the voice whispered.
“Profile name; Tress,” Ooma answered.
“Tress created. Welcome User Tress.”
Ooma turned her head to look at Tress with a shrewd eye. “You have stopped digging.”
Tress startled and pushed her shovel back into the earth, turning the next spot, stepping forward to do it again.
“Voiceprint needed, User Tress,” the voice continued. “Please say ‘Hello Interface, my name is Tress.'”
Ooma slapped Tress’s leg. “Repeat the command, you silly girl.”
“Uh… Hello Inter-face, my name is Tress?”
“Voiceprint failure. Please say ‘Hello Interface, my name is Tress.'”
“Hello Interface, my name is Tress.”
“Voiceprint success. Please repeat with ‘Hello Interface, my name is Tress.'”
“Hello Interface, my name is Tress,” Tress said again, more confident in her response.
“Voiceprint success. User Tress, you can request an Interface by stating ‘Open Interface.’ Session closed.”
“Go ahead and try it,” Ooma grinned, slapping her hands together to shake the wet dirt from her fingers.
Tress pushed the shovel in again, and pulled the next spadeful out of the ground. “Open Interface.”
The same voice whispered, but it was in her ear and only her ear. “Interface.”
“Did you hear it?” Ooma asked devilishly at seeing the young woman’s discomfort.
“It’s in my ear!?” Tress clapped a hand over the right side of her head.
“Of course it is. The Dust is everywhere. It is all over you. Me. It’s inside our bodies. In the air around us. Dust is everywhere.”
“Interface,” the voice whispered again.
“It is saying Interface in my ear,” Tress relayed.
“Say ‘Close Interface.'” Ooma laughed.
“Close Interface.”
“Session closed,” and the voice was gone.
“Those are magic words to others, but you will understand what they do,” Ooma nodded respectively. “In time, you will learn how to encode your own language into movement so you don’t have to say words at all. Like my tricks with the teapot and cups.”
“Really?” Tress wondered aloud.
“Just wait until I show you how to access the Histories. These tiny machines have among themselves all of the records of our ancestors and their ancestors. They have all the knowledge that it will take to elevate the human race back to the stars. When we are ready.”
Tress let the thoughts wash over her as she worked the soil. “When will we be ready?”
Ooma tittered her laugh at the thought left unspoken. “That we are ready now? Absurd. We will not see in our lifetimes, or over the next ten generations. The planet has to reach a new equilibrium, and the Dust must finish their remediations. So we wait.”
“But why?” Tress pushed.
“The Dust is correcting about five hundred years of human mistakes. It is having to process the atmosphere of old pollution, it is working its way through the soil, consuming vast wastelands of trash and waste, and it is having to consume and transmute similar messes in the oceans. The big places will all but disappear by the time the Dust has finished their jobs,” Ooma waved at the wide garden space around them, nestled in the trees. “This paradise that we live in is because the Dust has already been at work for a thousand years, but it will take another thousand before the human race is ready. It will take an entire age for the animals, birds, and fish to recover. Right now, the Magi across the world are prepping the people… sharing a common myth and religion system, building a shared foundational belief in human nature.”
“I still don’t understand.” Tress kicked another shovelful over, taking another step to the side.
“In time, you will. In the ancient times, people were separated by many things. Race, language, belief, sex, age, wealth… and all these things compounded the failures of the people. Every tribe was only for themselves, and every tribe ended up paying the cost of such closed-off thought. The Magi are the fix. While the Dust heals the Earth, the Magi heal the people. We guide them all, everywhere, across all the lands and seas, under a shared set of beliefs and morals. We correct behavior, guide leaders, allow life to take its course. And the people do not know it, and will never know it, but the Magi are their rulers. Secret rulers, but rulers never the less. Strange world, is it not?”
Tress reached the end of the row and leaned against the shovel. Beads of sweat were collecting at her forehead from the toil. “Why was belief so different? Why so fractured?”
Ooma shrugged. “I do not know. But my guess is simple. I believe it was a lack of hope.”
“Hope?”
“When you fail to hope for a common future, and fail to hope for the generations that will come, and do not hope for your neighbors and their neighbors… when all that hope fails, doom is inevitable,” Ooma stood shakily, her knees making small cracking noises as she rose from the ground. “It is simple, Tress. We Magi are Hope.”