Smoke and Computer Screens

It was in 2030. I was eight when Andrew Caesar showed me how to cut a person in half and separate the two parts of the magic box so that the face and feet will be in two opposite sides of the room. He lifted the long knife and his beautiful assistant Lena smiled at me from within the box, while her legs, twenty feet away, moved gracefully.
"Very simple, Matt," Andrew said, and opened the box from which Lena was smiling, and showed me she was still pretty much whole, only folded like a newly ironed shirt. He wasn't willing to show me whose legs moved.
Magic, Andrew said, isn't true magic if the magician reveals his secrets. And then he wrapped himself in his shiny crimson cape, let Lena loose, and they both bowed and laughed.
I clapped like a good boy, to make them happy. It was very important to me that Andrew and Lena will be happy, and then I could go to my virtual school and tell the entire class about the private show I got from Andrew Caesar, the greatest magician of that time.
The truth was, that when Andrew and Lena disappeared behind the stages, I glanced at the legs who still moved inside the box, and saw them disappear along with the setting when Lena - the real one, with the legs and all - shut the holographic projector down. Then Andrew called me.
Andrew didn't know I saw the legs disappear. It was one of his best magic tricks, and no one knew how he did that. I'm not even sure Lena knew how the legs that were supposed to be hers moved over there.
Once, magicians used to do the same with dolls and hidden boxes - "Smoke and Mirrors," Andrew said, and let at least two people from the audience check his box for dolls and hidden stuff. Everyone returned with a confused expression on the faces, because there really wasn't anything there.
Many people mocked Andrew, said he was a charlatan and deceiver, that he uses technology he invented to play tricks instead of help humanity. But the crowds of fans, people tired of the technological and seeking the fantastic, refused to listen and kept making guesses. Andrew never revealed to anyone the secret of Lena's two halves. "That," he used to say, "is why I'm a magician."
And he really was a magician. No one was as outstanding, as magnificent, as fantastic, marvelous and awe-inspiring as Andrew Caesar. Then, when I was eight, all the kids in the class and I would see him walk on air, or cut Lena in half, or pull funny objects out of people's ears. We'd jump and cheer like a herd of little asthmatic elephants. And Andrew and Lena would take a bow and smile, and in their smiles you could see that there was nothing there but pure, real magic.
Andrew Caesar went with my father to the local public school in Armstrong City, the moon. They were very good friends from the start, and that was how I got to meet face to face with the greatest magician of the twenty-first century. He was about thirty years old when we met, much younger than all the gray-haired, bearded wizards who stood on their stages and waved their ghastly arms and whispered words twenty syllables long and looked stupid. He was one of the most handsome men I've ever seen. Tall and slender with wonderfully thoughtful movements, hair as black as space and honest gray eyes that would practically shine when he leaned over his magic box and cried out "Abracadabra!" in an excited, fiery voice, for all the hall and all the world to hear.
In one word, he was noble, in another word, magical.
He first performed in 2017 and excited the audiences so much he became a legend within a mere year. His booming, soft voice, his wonderful looks, and most of all, his honest eyes and utter refusal to admit his magic tricks' true nature made him nothing less than a monument. Disliking Andrew Caesar was all but impossible.
And loved he was. For years, he and his assistant Lena, the charming European youth he took as a partner and adopted daughter, traveled all across the Earth and the inner worlds. No show failed, no magic was unsuccessful. Back then, when technology wasn't obvious, when magic mattered, the love the public had for the pair reached it peak, in the 30s of the twenty first century, before the great technological boom.
The years passed by, almost crawling. I passed from virtual school to a real life high school, and then to the Science Academy on the terraformed Mars. I had a full life and I drowned in them, the demands of school consuming my world.
These were times of progress - the media of the twentieth century, the telephone, the newspapers, the television, were abandoned for the high-tech holovid and the rapidly growing Internet. The computers doubled and then tripled their power as time passed. The holographic technology picked up speed. The antigravs were invented and turned the world around entirely. Hovercrafts and breaking the Light Threshold made traffic fast and cheap.. And as technology progressed, Andrew Caesar's shows became more and more astonishing.
I kept following Andrew despite my obligations as a science student in a scientific time. I followed every show and saw every show on Mars. I saw how the years changed him as they changed me. But while I turned from a boy to a man, he descended from the peak of his life to old age, slowly, in an almost frightening way. His hair grayed, his deep, soft voice grew weaker and dryer, his careful, silky movements became stiff, tired somehow. And me, a normal guy in his twenties, saw the magician I admired gradually die right in front of me and refused to notice. In a way, I was totally blind.
I didn't know why back then. My admiration for Andrew made him look perfect regardless of reality. I don't think it would've changed anything if I knew.
When we finished the trimester in the Academy, I took my girlfriend, Coral, to a special performance Andrew gave. 2046, we were a young, happy couple, the first in our class. Coral wasn't too excited by the idea, but I spent the past three months among the books and computer, and I had to kick back a bit, leave the technology behind and see something else, something magical.
We took a hovercraft to the center of Mars's biggest city, Orevon, a near-perfect replica of Las Vegas at the end of the twentieth century, neon lights, smog and all. Around us, signs shown in blinding light, huge silver hovercrafts with lithium engines cut noisily through the aerial traffic jams, and exotic creatures stood in front of a giant holovid and cheered. Coral said she had a headache. I kissed her, not for real, just to make her forget it.
Around the stadium there were much less people than I expected. Maybe the media wasn't informed of the show. Maybe everyone's already inside. We found a parking space easily, above a Subaru model 2020 with a fusion engines that made Coral green with envy. We met some friends from the Academy on the way to the gates. I told Coral to try, just try to have some fun.
"With all due respect, Matthew," she told me coolly, "we're mature people who go to see magic tricks. Don't you find that even a little bit weird?"
"That's not any ordinary magic, Coral," I told her and tried to smile. "That's Andrew Caesar."
She didn't smile back. Coral was a perfectly practical woman. One of the reasons we broke up. Her mere expression clearly stated that she would much rather be in the Academy preparing for the next trimester.
I dragged her into the stadium, and we found seats easily. There weren't many people there, that stunned me, and the great spotlights shone on a thousand empty seats, that painfully contrasted half the number of occupied ones. Even then I was trying to convince myself that maybe people simply didn't hear of the show or anything. Coral, who sat next to me making a face, shattered the illusion bit by bit.
The show started, and I was swept into a world of magic. On the stage, facing the hundreds of empty seats, almost blinded by the spotlight, Andrew Caesar looked nothing like a great magician, and people seemed to notice. The claps that greeted the gray-haired man, who projected not grace but hopeless tiredness, would've caused the Andrew I knew to roar at the crowd "where the hell's your excitement??" and smile. Lena, who stood besides him, still beautiful and almost as young as she used to be, tried to do that for him, but he silenced her gently. Andrew Caesar, the greatest magician of the twentieth century, didn't want pity.
They still performed. Again Lena was cut in half, Andrew walked through fire and made a bored volunteer from the audience hover. He threw pigeons into the air out of empty hands and put a screen of water up behind him. Next to me, Coral yawned.
I nudged her hard, "Just look at that, Coral, ain't it fantastic?"
"You call this fantastic, Matt?" She answered me with derision she didn't bother hiding. "Some holograms, some tunneling, some antigravity. Smoke and computer screens. We do such things in advanced science lessons. This... "magician" can sell his nonsense to little kids who didn't start virtual school, but everyone else just knows how he does these things. He just does them a bit more flashy."
Coral and I broke up that night.
The next day, walking through the Academy, sad and brooding, I asked my less practical classmates about the show. I was never ready for the answer.
"Forget that, Matt, just an amateur who plays with the shadows," they said. "That technology is ages old. What's so magical?" They stared dumbly as I ran away and didn't even bother to ask why.
But they were right, and Coral was right. In a world where technology was so advanced and so closely at reach that every kid could create illusions like Andrew Caesar, magic was no attraction. Where everything seemed possible, everything mysterious was understood, somehow we lost the sense of awe. Of wonderment, excitement, wish to understand and dreams of the impossible was left nothing more than a crazy, feverish race for more and more knowledge, more and more illusions to shatter...
I graduated school, left Mars and set on my way home to Earth. I became a scientist like half the world. I expertise in sociology. I built myself a life. Yesterday, I read in the on-line newspaper that Andrew Caesar, the greatest magician of the twenty first century, shot himself dead.
That day I sat all day in front of the holovid and read every possible newspaper. Nothing major - Laser gun, maximum power, one shot. A quick, painless death, gentle somehow.
I went to the funeral. There weren't many people there. Some friends, some fans - those who were left- and those who didn't really care but felt compelled to go. Lena walked among them all, dressed in black for the first time in her life, and cried on the shoulder of everyone who let her.
She caught up to me when I walked back to the hovercraft. When she saw me, she smiled a bit.
"Andrew asked that you won't be sad when he dies." She said in a melodic European accent.
"He was my friend." I replied quietly. She smiled a bit wider.
"He wanted you to remember him like that." She went on "Andrew always said a magician is a pretender if he can't make his audience feel awe."
"No one feels awe anymore." I wasn't sure it was me saying that.
She nodded "Andrew knew that. It was finally obvious, all smoke and mirrors. Everyone knew it was technology. But he wasn't a scientist - he was a magician."
I didn't answer that. I went home.
I quit my job. I just couldn't take the sight of the computers. I took every machine out of the house. I disconnected all the computers from the net, I even disconnected the videophone.
I left only one computer active and on-line. I opened the D+ and began programming. At first I was disgusted when touching the keyboard, then I was consumed by the mission.
After a course of eight years and with a natural talent, I programmed the deadliest computer virus even possible. I worked on it into the night. I thought of Andrew, of Lena, of the impossible possibility of a world where nothing is new, nothing is magical.
I finished the program, saved it, went onto the net and let my destructive creation loose on an unsuspecting world. And I can't wait to know what'll happen when every scientist in the world will activate his computer, and won't be able to make the screen show any word other than "Abracadabra."

The End