The Fundamentals of Sorcery

By Paul Edwards

This is a continuation of my previous novel "The Applications of Sorcery". The hero gets the girl as he battles steroid abusing superheros, UFO's among many other challenges.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Edwards
• Release date: Apr 6, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458054807

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The Fundamentals of Sorcery

Copyright © 2011 Paul Edwards

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

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The Fundamentals of Sorcery

Chapter one

Terri and I had rented a large secluded house in Miami. The house had a pool in the backyard, which was surrounded by a number of large shady trees. The perimeter was lined with expensive Italian tile.

I was looking through the large sliding glass doors that led out to the backyard. Terri was lying on a large comfortable deck chair under one of the shade trees. She had on a bright red bikini and was sipping a margarita while reading the latest issue of Cosmopolitan magazine.

Terri had become heavier in the three months we had lived there she no longer had the fit and toned body she had had when I first met her.

It was not a surprise to me though since all she seemed to do lately was lounge around the pool reading magazines and drinking margaritas.

The extra weight hadn’t diminished her beauty however, she now resembled a pinup model from the nineteen fifties.

I opened the sliding door causing Terri to look up from her magazine.

I’m off to the university, are you sure you don’t want to come?

I’m good, maybe some other time, she replied.

I knew the some other time would probably never come, she was happy with the level of her skill in transcendent technology and felt no need to increase it. I did not feel the same way.

Since we had arrived in this alternate universe Terri and I had tried to be as inconspicuous as possible. We had been able to earn a living by copying a small plain platinum ring over and over and selling it to various pawnshops.

We were careful not to sell any of the rings in Miami using the doorway app to travel to other cities.

This had given us more then enough money to live quite comfortably and enabled me to hire one of the graduate students from the local university to tutor me on the finer points of writing software algorithms.

I closed the sliding door and walked through the house and out the front door. I took my car keys from my front pocket and walked over to the one extravagance we had purchased, an eight-year-old Porsche nine eleven.

Terri loved small fast sports cars and refused to drive anything else. I got into the Porsche and started it up. I had to admit the engine note always caused goose bumps to appear on my arms.

I backed out of our driveway and headed for the university.

It took me about fifteen minutes to make my way my tutor’s small office on the campus of the university. He was a young thin male dressed in what I guessed the entire hip and broke intelligentsia thought was trendy.

He was wearing jeans that looked like they had been used as a washrag and a T-shirt with an undecipherable phrase written on in it, the letters all in different fonts and sizes.

The whole uniform was completed with long hair stiff with mousse and rectangular black plastic glasses that must have been close to functionally useless because of the small size of the lenses.

Hello Rip, I said

Oh hi James, he said looking up from his laptop.

Rip was a PhD candidate in computer science, his thesis had something to do with artificial intelligence. He had tried to explain it to me once but he had been so obsessed with describing the minutia of it that I had lost all interest.

I guess we could finish up on how to write algorithms without using loops, I have some questions about a few of the examples in the textbook, I said to Rip as I sat down across on the chair in front of his desk.

We have gone about as far as we can in theory, you’re going to have to buckle down and choose a language to work with in order for us to progress, Rip said with a perturbed look on his face.

We had been having this discussion or argument a lot lately. Rip could not conceive of a person who just wanted to learn theory and thought that my reluctance to actually pick a computer language stemmed from an inferior intelligence.

I couldn’t tell him that I actually had a language, Transcendent technology. I wouldn’t have dreamed of telling him that. The thought of such an impersonal and arrogant person having access to this ability was enough to make me nauseous.

As I’ve said before, I am using this for a proprietary geological mining process, computer languages aren’t necessary, I said.

I can’t see how that’s possible, what do algorithms and rocks have to do with each other?

Nothing at all, I thought to myself.

It’s a secret Rip, if I told everybody how the things I do work I wouldn’t be a multi-millionaire.

I could see a repressed look of anger and annoyance pass across his face. Like most people who felt themselves superior to the other members of humanity, evidence to the contrary was extremely disconcerting.

I think that you actually may be right on one count Rip. I think that we may have gone as far as I need. Lets finish up on these questions I have and then I’ll settle the bill.

I had been travelling back to the computer Lab in the nexus Jose had created three or four times a week and practising the things I had learned from Rip.

With all the stuff I knew now I had been able to create a new Personal Digital Assistant that was almost as powerful as the one Jose had used. The bonus being that I knew exactly how it worked. I also added the one thing Jose had overlooked, it was password protected.

Ok, Rip said. I could tell he was relieved to be rid of me, but I also sensed a reluctance to give up the extra cash I was paying him.

We spent the next hour going over the questions I had had about loopless programming. Rip was a good teacher and able to break down and explain complex theories in an understandable way. It was unfortunate that his arrogance and superiority complex would never