Wizard Alone

Consultations 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: WON'T. Kit let out a long breath of exasperation. "Oh, come on," he said in the Speech. "Why not?" The screen remained blue, staring at him mulishly. Kit wondered what he'd done to deserve this. "It can't be that bad," he said. "You two even have the same version number." VERSIONS AREN'T EVERYTHING! Kit rubbed his eyes. "I thought a six-year-old child was supposed to be able to program one of these things," said a voice from the next room. "I sure feel like a six-year-old at the moment," Kit muttered. "It would work out about the same." Kit's father wandered in and stood there staring at the TV. Not being a wizard himself, he couldn't see the Speech written there, and wouldn't have been able to make sense of it if he had, but he could see the blue screen well enough. "So what's the problem?" "It looks like they hate each other," Kit said. His father made a rueful face. "Software issues," he said. He was a pressman for one of the bigger newspapers on the Island, and in the process of the company converting from hot lead to electronic and laser printing, he had learned more than most people cared to know about the problems of converting from truly hard "hardware" to the computer kind. "Nope," Kit said. "I wish it were that simple." "What is it, then?" Kit shook his head. Once upon a time, not so long ago, getting mechanical things to see things his way had been Kit's daily stock-in-trade. Now everything seemed to be getting more complex by the day. "Issues they've got, all right," he said. "I'm not sure they make sense to me yet." His father squeezed his shoulder. "Give it time, son," he said. "You're a brujo; nothing can withstand your power." "Nothing that's not made of silicon, anyway," Kit said. His father rolled his eyes. "Tell me all about it," he said, and went away. Kit sat there staring at the blue screen, trying to sort through the different strategies he'd tried so far, determining which ones hadn't worked, which ones had worked a little bit, and which ones had seemed to be working just fine until without warning they crashed and burned. The manual for the new remote said that the new DVD player was supposed to look for channels on the TV once they were plugged into each other, but the remote and the DVD player didn't even want to acknowledge each other's existence so far, let alone exchange information. Neither the DVD's manual nor the remote's was any help. The two pieces of equipment both came from the same company, they were both made in the same year and, as far as Kit could tell, in the same place. But when he listened to them with a wizard's ear, he heard them singing two different songs-in ferociousDuane, Diane is the author of 'Wizard Alone ', published 2002 under ISBN 9780152045623 and ISBN 0152045627.