Challenge Aftermath: A Lesson on Magic

Every girl in the harem was still processing the challenge and the vote.

The slow trip into the cave was interrupted by a shout from Laurel.

“You actually made it!”

She turned to Ariadne, a brilliant blue glow lighting both of their faces.

“That’s amazing!”

“Look,” Ariadne said, pointing toward a small sphere.

Laurel’s face lit up with a grin.

“Yes! Can I touch it?”

“It’s perfectly safe. The tritium isn’t inserted.”

Laurel rushed over and started examining the sphere on its dais.

“What are we looking at?” Joan asked quietly.

She suspected she knew. The humid air from the pool clung to her skin.

“Ariadne has a nuke in here!” Laurel shouted happily.

Joan smiled softly.

Natalia stiffened.

Chloe and Christian held hands.

Ariadne grinned.

“You said it was safe?” Natalia asked.

“The warhead is completely safe,” Ariadne said. “The radioactive material providing the glow is bonded with glass and underwater, absorbing anything dangerous. The tritium used for a normal plutonium warhead would need to be inserted shortly before detonation, so the core is basically an art piece. If we really wanted to detonate it and kill everyone in the room, it would require magic or equipment we don’t have.”

She stepped into the pool.

“It’s just really funny.”

The girls were already naked. After the challenge, Ariadne had nothing to ask them to remove.

“This is so cool!” Laurel laughed.

Joan went over and stood beside her, investigating the sphere. It was smaller than a baseball.

“I thought it would be bigger,” Joan said.

“The big part is the rocket that throws it all the way to Russia,” Laurel said, sounding pleased. “That thing is pretty heavy, but tiny.”

Joan stared at it.

“Don’t worry,” Laurel added. “If you died, you’d get dragged back on set.”

“That is not comforting,” Joan said.

A very concerned Natalia entered the pool and floated opposite Ariadne. Even in the blue light, the change Tess had **** on her was impossible to miss.

“Was Tess sincere when she said she thought my children should be necromancers?” Natalia asked.

“It’s literally what the Audience does, depending on how you define the culture,” Ariadne said. “Life magic is emotion, sex, and changing your brain and body. It is not for kids. **** magic collects information, reverses damage, and places an intermediary between the magical effect and the caster’s will, such as an animated skeleton. Children start with **** magic and learn life magic as adults. The tradition is not dysfunctional.”

Ariadne had settled into lecture mode.

Chloe and Christian sat together between Ariadne and Natalia, more interested in magical lore than the terrifying situation that had produced it.

“What did you learn when you were their age?” Natalia asked.

“When I was their chronological age, I was learning how to make that fancy paperweight.”

Ariadne gestured toward the warhead Laurel and Joan were still examining.

“At their developmental stage, I was learning necromancy.”

“You learned magic before science?” Christian asked, surprised.

“I hate to say this, but they aren’t separate domains for me.” Ariadne looked mildly embarrassed. “I would like to start from the beginning.”

Laurel and Joan made their way into the pool.

Laurel sat right next to Natalia, to Natalia’s discomfort.

Joan slid in beside Chloe, her Chloe-form body between her Alan-designed body and the other girl.

“How far back are we talking?” Laurel asked. “The Big Bang seems like a lot.”

“Not that far.” Ariadne shook her head. “I want to start with a question, though. Why are we apes?”

“Are you an ape?” Natalia asked. “You said you were a dragon.”

“I’m both.” Ariadne smiled. “I am a human who is also a dragon.”

“I literally saw her come out of a human as a bloody little blob,” Laurel said.

“That I did,” Ariadne said. “I had Alan watch the process on our date, with my latest siblings, for those who didn’t hear about it.”

She glanced around the pool.

“What evolves from an ape remains an ape, in scientific terms.”

“Why do you turn into a snake if you’re human?” Natalia asked. “I’ve tried to be polite about that, but I don’t understand.”

“That is a very different story from the story of magic, and less interesting.” Ariadne giggled. “But the first lesson is about human magic.”

Her voice shifted.

“Where are the flightless, serpentine crows making their way out of far islands, branching tongues turned to tendrils? Where are the walls of elephant cities, built by something stronger and safer than your kind? Where are the evolved capybaras, birds, and monkeys on their backs, half-beaver weaving craft and expanding a kingdom from a South American realm of peace?”

The pool went quiet.

“Why one ape, one time, one way, when intelligence and social structure and tool use are everywhere in the animal kingdom? Every animal is a ghost of what could have been you, bound by the same chain of chemistry stretching back to the first spark of life.”

“Hands?” Joan suggested.

“You were a Crawler for several days,” Ariadne said. “How were the tendrils?”

“They were excellent, but most animals don’t have those either.”

“Actually, they do. Tongues are the same kind of structure. It is easier to make one of my tendrils out of a tongue than a human hand out of a paw. You started with chimpanzee hands, and they changed to become more useful.”

Ariadne shook her head.

“It wasn’t hands.”

“Something to do with social structures?” Chloe asked.

“Yes, but not something general. Many animals are social. Perhaps most, depending on the definition. Capybaras and elephants are as social as humans. Beavers have excellent tool use. Neuron by neuron, a crow has a better brain. A hundred species of apes never started down the path that made the human ape into a person.”

“Maybe we’re not that special,” Natalia said thoughtfully. “We think we’re special, but maybe it’s just luck. Maybe any of them could have done it.”

“No,” Ariadne said flatly.

Natalia blinked.

“Most animals on your Earth are domestic ones by weight,” Ariadne continued. “Much of the planet’s photosynthesis is tied to your economy. Look at Earth from space, and you see the glow of cities. Morally, scientifically, there is much to value in the other species of Earth, but humans are special.”

“Is it because we’re crazy?” Joan asked. “I remember a Stephen King novel that said we won because we were the craziest bastards in the animal kingdom.”

“I suspect he never met a hippopotamus if he believed that.” Ariadne laughed. “Animals hold grudges. They work together. They use tools. They dream. They have friends. They watch the sunset.”

“Okay, I’m stumped,” Joan admitted. “Did some god just give us a leg up?”

“Maybe.” Ariadne shook her head. “That isn’t the important part. Why give it to humans if you’re giving it at all, and why only humans?”

“Language, then?” Natalia asked.

“Ah. That is where your earlier argument becomes correct. Animals talk to each other, and humans barely notice. Humans already had a gift before Prometheus came down, or before we invented the story of a doomed titan.”

Ariadne had captured the room’s attention.

“Imagine what became humans. A race of apes that resembled chimpanzees. Clever, vicious things. They had adapted to trees, and the trees were thinning. They had to leave them. As the grasslands grew, the safety of the branches faded. A bunch of apes had to cross the ground together.”

She let the silence hold.

“What did they do when they were scared?”

“We shouted at them,” Laurel said, content in the water. “We were like barking dogs, but we all did it together. That, and we threw rocks at scary things.”

“Exactly,” Ariadne said calmly. “That is the time and place humanity diverged from our closest living relatives.”

“Um, what?” Joan asked.

“Think about a group of apes or monkeys on the ground,” Ariadne said. “They’re shouting, waving their arms, throwing rocks. You can imagine that in your mind, right?”

Joan nodded.

“Imagine a mob of them on the ground. That was their only defense against something dangerous and hungry, such as a lion. They had to stick together and scare anything that could win a fight.”

“That’s where we came in,” Laurel said.

She sounded almost proud.

“Think about it. We got better at it. We learned to wave our arms to look bigger. We started shouting together. When we were more rhythmic in sight and sound, we confused and scared the big cats more than when we were just a mob. We seemed more like one big animal, not a bunch of small animals. Any animal that ignored the noise got rocks for their trouble.”

“The strategy had a weakness,” Ariadne said, picking up the rhythm with her. “We had to do it together. One ape shouting wasn’t scary to a lion. A dozen could drive off almost anything. If everyone in the group ran, the lion got a meal. If everyone stood together, the lion left them alone. The situation repeated. Humans became better and better at that.”

Ariadne leaned back in the glowing water.

“We became musical because that is what song and dance are. Not mating display, like birds. Survival behavior.”

“Also cheerleading,” Laurel said.

Several people turned toward her.

“Families in the stands. Players on the field. Cheerleaders in the middle. All that emotional energy channeled against something that feels like a lion, even if it’s just another bunch of humans.”

“That is the first thing you learned that no other animal has mastered,” Ariadne said. “It relies on shared feeling. You don’t just notice the emotions of other humans. You don’t simply respond to them as information. They trigger the feeling inside you. Humans became emotional mimics because that was what worked against lions.”

“It worked,” Laurel said. “That’s the crazy thing. This isn’t a neat story. Fossils show that when we left the trees, we changed. We got slower. We got worse in a fight. Our bodies became harder to hide. All of that was happening while our diets got better. We were worse, except we were thriving.”

She grinned.

“It’s like those flightless birds on islands that die the minute a cat shows up, physically. Except we were wild apes in Africa, and we were eating better food despite getting tastier.”

“That was before they became truly clever, too,” Ariadne said. “Stone tools start showing up later, though not much later. Humans had more protein and different selection pressures, ones that appear unique. Your brains began to grow to accommodate the social cognition linked to survival. Larger brains stumbled on stone tools, fire, hunting tactics, and traps.”

Ariadne smiled.

“Humans danced, and sang, and thrived.”

The pool processed the story in silence for several minutes.

“Wasn’t this about magic?” Joan finally asked.

“What do you think magic is?” Laurel asked sleepily. “Did you think this was Harry Potter, where weird X-Men knockoffs inherit genes that give them superpowers? Humans are already mystics. We dissolve into the emotions of a crowd. That’s why we believe in gods. They don’t have to exist, because we actually touch something with our brains. It’s just an image of each other, not some fairy monster in another dimension.”

“That is a bit inaccurate,” Ariadne said, “but useful.”

Laurel splashed her lightly.

Ariadne ignored her.

“Humans believe in everything you call magic because of the hardware developed at this stage of evolution. They can identify with gods, model them, and try to negotiate with them. Real gods respond to that, if they exist in that dimension. Humans mimic emotions, and they think everything else is doing it too.”

“As above, so below,” Christian murmured.

“Yes,” Ariadne said. “That is the other law of magic, the one that doesn’t need a god on the other side. Humans think the universe works like them, so there doesn’t need to be a direct connection for a symbol to cause a change. This generalizes. It isn’t everything, but it’s the most important part.”

Ariadne sounded proud now.

“The first lesson is understanding yourselves. You are mimics of emotion and behavior. That is what the Audience does at a scale you cannot yet imagine. They use the power to change themselves through mimicry and contagion. They are not isolated godlings. They are the material that carries waves of change and purpose.”

“That can’t be it,” Christian said, annoyed. “We can’t do what you can. We can’t raise the dead, teleport, or shapeshift.”

“Those aren’t magic,” Ariadne said.

Christian stared at her.

“You are describing applications. You could use engineering to do those things. The Audience carries the knowledge and gathers the resources to perform what you think is impossible. They found ways to become more plastic and shared that plasticity with each other. That lets abilities spread and sustain themselves in ways your history encountered rarely, or not at all.”

She looked around the pool.

“Every world they find, they learn, they mimic, and they let the wave of contagion spread from that world. To learn magic is to learn to open yourself to the contagion.”

“That’s why they survived losing, isn’t it?” Chloe asked. “They absorb what their conquerors did.”

“That, and anyone who wanted to fight them had to learn to open themselves. There is no meaningful difference between someone from your world who learns to open themselves and someone from my mother’s world who studies your world.”

Ariadne sighed.

“I know this isn’t the lesson anyone wanted.”

“It’s interesting,” Joan said. “I don’t know what else we could have expected.”

“What do you mean?” Christian asked.

“We were told we would learn magic. That means we were going to be exposed to another worldview, or else it wouldn’t be magic. We expected deep, mysterious lore from the ancient past, didn’t we? We thought we would be surprised. I don’t see how we can complain about being surprised when that’s what we came for.”

“I guess,” Christian said.

She felt like sulking, but had trouble justifying it to herself.

“Thank you, Ariadne,” Natalia said after another silence. “Is this what my children would have been taught?”

“At some point, yes,” Ariadne said. “They would probably have learned how to animate skeletons and summon ghosts first. That is usually easier to explain to a kid.”

Natalia looked at the glowing sphere on its dais.

Then at Ariadne.

Then at the water around her.

“Your definition of easier worries me.”

“It should,” Ariadne said. “That is probably healthy.”