I waited for the green again. That scant little flash of green as the sun winks out behind the horizon. That’s where the magic
was. In the flash. That’s what she said. That’s what she always said. Not that I believe in magic. I’d like to, but I know
better. The world isn’t built of that. It’s built of churning molten metal, minerals and stone, a thin wisp of atmosphere,
and a magnetic field to keep the worst radiation out. Magic was just something people liked to believe in, something they
thought they could feel or sense, something that made everything more than just mechanical certainty. Something that made
them more than flesh and bone.
The truth is that the flash is nothing but an increased refraction of light in the atmosphere. But tell that to most people
and you’d get slack-jawed stares like you simply didn’t get it. Like you were the one who didn’t understand. Because you couldn’t see or feel magic. People liked to believe in magic.
Back when there were people.
They’re gone now. All of them. The last one died some fifteen years back—a crazy old coot who had holed up for almost two
decades beneath New York City, eating rats and sneaking out to collect rainwater. Some say he’d had enough; that he just couldn’t
take it anymore. He walked out into the middle of the city, past a number of sentries and citizens—back when New York still
had citizens—everyone baffled at the mere sight of him, more mystified than anything else, and a constable gunned him down,
right there in the street. His body lay there three days, like a relic or a broken toy, citizens streaming slowly past to
take their last look at a human being, until some machine had the decency to scrape him off the pavement and dump him into
an incinerator.
