Wood Sprites

Louise growled as Jillian veered totally off subject. “That’s not the point. Besides I can’t blame them. Learned behavior is a fairly simple punishment-and-reward system. I wouldn’t even know how to start to teach compassionate response.”

“We’re not animals. They wonder what is wrong with our country, but isn’t it fairly obvious that if children are being treated like animals instead of rational beings, as adults they’ll respond like monkeys?”

“Shut up or I’m going to fling poo at you!”

Jillian frowned as she realized that Louise was angry. “What’s wrong?”

“I–I don’t know. It’s just this weird feeling. Here, look. See this?” Louise pulled up the last data trail she’d followed. “It’s a micro blog post from three years ago.”

“The Dufae gate uses magic!!!” Jillian read. “You were right; someone figured it out.”

Louise impatiently waved her to wait. “The guy that posted this was an M.I.T. student by the name of Michael Kensbock. This is his posting history. He put out something on average every ten minutes. Two months later, his stream stops. This is his last post.”

The message said: “Eureka! I haz magic. Nobel iz mine! Party time!”

“He made one!” Jillian cried excitedly.

“Yes, right before he disappeared.” Louise pulled up the page that his family had put together in an attempt to find him. “He was at a bar with friends and went to the bathroom and never came back. Here’s the weird thing. Right after he disappeared, someone took down all his content. His vlogs, his e-mails — everything that could be erased — was. His micro blog posts are the only thing not erased, although I’m finding evidence that this service had undergone a massive virus attack at that time.”

“Maybe his disappearance didn’t have anything to do with the generator.”

“And his entire web presence erased?”

Jillian sighed and changed the subject. “Did you find a copy of the magic-generator thing?”

“It took some digging.” Louise pulled up the site. “I noticed that he liked to use a cartoon icon of himself. So I did a pattern-recognition search on the image and a few of the most basic spell symbols, assuming that he would need a spell to test the generator.”

“So you could hit anything that a normal search would miss?”

Louise nodded. “He obviously was going to publish the page to announce his work, but he didn’t want it found until he’d verified his findings, so he carefully didn’t use any words that would point a search at his page.”

The page had everything needed to create a generator with a high-end 3D printer. It looked simple: a molded plastic box with two power ports. One was a normal male 220 plug, which would indicate that the generator required power on the level of a clothes dryer. The second set of connectors was mere thin wires coated with plastic with flat tabs at the end. They didn’t look like anything that Louise knew, and they were identified as “magic connectors,” which normally would have made her giggle. There were complete schematics on building a matrix of parallel Casimir plates a few micrometers apart and detailed explanations of how the electricity was turned into magic. It was complicated, but Louise could understand it.

After building the generator and running careful studies on its output, he’d used it to cast a simple detection spell designed to map out ley lines.

“I’m worried,” Louise said. “This was his super-secret personal site he had stashed in the cloud. He had three public sites, but they’re all toast. Someone did a very good job of worming into even cache copies of his sites and making them unreadable.”

“Who knows what else he might have been doing that pissed someone off?”

“The thing is, he’s not the only one.” Louise flicked open windows of earlier dead ends. “Torbjorn Pettersen was a Norwegian who disappeared two years ago after publishing an article in Scientific American on field manipulation using quantum particles in an attempt to explain how Leonardo’s gate moved Pittsburgh to Elfhome. After him, there was a scientist named Lisa Sutterland who was doing similar work and was killed when someone tried to kidnap her six months later. Marcus Shipman published work on the gate, and he’s also missing. And Harry Russell. He went missing while he was under house arrest. He had a GPS microchip implanted on him as part of his punishment. Police should have been able to find him using that, but they couldn’t until two months ago. The chip turned up inside a fish in St. Louis.”

“As in the fish ate part of him? Eeewww!”

“That’s what they think. Everyone I’ve found that has come close to figuring out how Leonardo’s gate works has either disappeared mysteriously or been killed.”

“Well, we’re not going to tell anyone what we figure out. You were careful and made sure you couldn’t be traced?”

“Of course I was!” Louise said. “After the first two guys turned up missing, I went into silent-running mode.”

“Good. Let’s copy the source and then not hit this site again.”