It was a stunning sight, taken from the edge of a balcony, but at such a height that they were dizzy only by looking at the image. All around, tall buildings in the thousands, scrapping the clouds, going beyond the horizon.

“Splendid, isn’t it?” a man voice said. “For the record, today, humanity reached one hundred billion. Our peak of progress. Not! We’re doomed. We are slaves, living in cubicles, working in cubicles, looking at screens which tell us what to think, or even laugh to show us when to laugh… We’re doomed.”

“No, we’re not!” replied another voice. The image turned to show a woman in her late fifties. She was small, with white hair, severe face. “Nephew, get down from the railing; we have to talk!”

“No, aunty. I’ll jump. Just to ruin their hundred billion perfect number!”

“Get down. We have to talk about the Reactor!”

The image faded.

“You two look and tell me what happens. I cannot watch!” said Feyra, covering her eyes.

“Goodness, sis! I sometimes wonder if you have some brains. If he’s the father of the other guy, he didn't jump, obviously.”

Heyra pressed the triangle again; the scene had moved into a scarcely furnished apartment. The two protagonists were sitting on a couch.

“I’m recording this for posterity. Really, they agreed to build my Reactor?”

“Yes, nephew. I persuaded them. You can make your quarks soup now.”

“Formidable. We might have another chance. We could clean the oceans, terraform M…”

“It will be for a ship. One who will search for a new home.”

“What? That’s insane. How will they move bi… Oh!”

“Yes, Nephew. They want to leave and leave us behind. They’ll find a spot or two for us; after all, you’re the inventor.”

“I will not be a part of this! It’s criminal. They want to escape, sacrificing everyone else? Absolutely not!”

“They will not escape, kid. Trust me, play the game for now.”

The recording stopped again.

“I think he was joking, yes? There’s no way there can be someplace in the south who can hold one billion people!” objected the spy. “Not even on the whole Realm!”

“Mathematical terms change. Maybe it was one hundred million,” said Heyra.

“Still, that’s huge. We would have found traces of such a civilization,” argued Feyra.

“Actually, no, it’s quite logic,” argued Heyra back.” They were on that continent at the south pole, the one who’s under permanent ice now. The climate changed, they were doomed to freeze, and the rich paid this guy to build a ship with a… what, they said Reactor? Could it be a steam engine? But quark soup, that is strange.”

“Quack, maybe he said quack,” said the spy. “Quacks comes from the ducks. Maybe they were producing hydrocarbons from an organic soup made from ducks. Who knows? Maybe there were many ducks there.”

“This is plausible,” admitted Heyra. “Creepy, but plausible. They would need extreme pressure and temperature chamber. So, quack cauldron it is. Let’s see what happened next!”

The image moved into a large round room, surrounded by tables and screens, with many people pressing buttons for unknown reasons. The man was on his feet and had a severe face.

“Put me on speakers!” he asked. Someone pressed a button, and he held a short speech.

“To all the crew, this is the Captain. Pay attention. We’re preparing to jump in five. This is NOT a drill. I repeat, this is NOT a drill. I have news for you all. A few years ago, me and my aunt, General Isadora, found out that our employers had planned to take this ship and escape. All that saving humanity publicity was smoke and mirrors. So we devised a plan of our own. We selected the crew and the workers from the most independent and brilliant people and from as many diverse environments and ethnicities as possible. Now, we’re commandeering the ship. It will help us, the ones to escape to a new home, not them. To give us a chance, my aunt is leading a revolt against our masters, as we speak. In… three minutes, we leave. If someones want to stay, please head to the closest escape shuttle and use it. Captain out!”

The image disappeared.

“They stole the ship,” nodded Heyra.“ I suppose it was a massive one, carrying in the thousands. If our biggest ferry can carry one thousand passengers, we can imagine that tenfold.”

“Good job!” exclaimed the spy. “It’s exactly what I would have done if… well, if I had such bad masters, instead of two lovely and smart ones, like you.”

“Oh, common, sweet talker, press that triangle!” Feyra hit him with a fist in the shoulder.

The next scene was showing a familiar landscape. It was unmistakably the plateau of the Upper City. The man was walking in a park, and someone was recording him from a lower perspective. His beard was more prominent now, and he looked older.

“I thought the recorder was lost!” the man said. “Only a little devious monkey like you could have found it after so many years!”

“It was in the attic, no big deal. A simple finding spell. But now I intend to use it for my homework, the history essay,” said a child's voice. “Can we start?”

“If you insist, Santiago! Go on!”

“Mister Captain, tell us about the differences between our former home and this one.”

“Our new home is beautiful, kid. Beautiful, wild, big. Nature is unspoiled; we were lucky the Providence brought us here. But if I was to single out the single bigger difference, it’s magic. We can do magic here.”

“What?” exclaimed Feyra. “That’s imposs…”

“Shh!” frowned the spy. “Let me hear about magic!”

“… But fields of energy are all over the universe,” was replying the child to something they had missed. “This force field explanation is wrong!”

“Who knows, Santiago. But the reality is that only a few days after the Arrival, we started to do magic. First, accidentally, then on purpose. A miracle. It took a year to figure it out and to put in place a system. We established a magical semantic interface using an artificial language from some storybooks.”

“And you messed up. This Quenya thing is killing me. They have so few words and ten cases. TEN CASES! “

“Ha! Do you see? I’ve told you!” exclaimed the spy.

It was Feyra’s turn to shush him.

The man raised his shoulders.

“Well, you do seem to have figured out shortcuts, son. But heed my warning. Despite how much talent you have, do your Quenya homework! It’s important to have a semantic structure in place, or else accidents would happen.”

“This is nonsense!” argued the child. “You invented false labels instead of keeping things simple. A structured will can…”

“Hey, kiddo, don’t criticize the grown-ups. Your magic teachers are complaining about you every day!”

“All right, all right,” said the kid with the tone of a wise person conceding before a more feeble-minded one. “Let’s talk about biological changes, then.”

“Oh, those… Well, we live longer, and we are healthier. I would be a very, very old man back home, here I’m still in my prime. But we reach our maturity slower, that’s also true. You’d be chasing girls, now.”

“Since we’re talking girls, what’s a moonstruck?”

“A what?” asked the man, confounded.

“You know, it’s in the biology book you have on your desk. Says the girls have their moonstriketion only every three months instead of every month. What’s this moon striking thing?”

“Look, look, a flying squirrel!” said the man, abruptly, obviously wanting to change the subject.

“Where, where?” asked the kid, and the image moved wildly around.

“Goodness! So gross! I would kill myself if I’d have to… you know…. Every month!” exclaimed Heyra.

“Hm…” replied the spy, not wanting to look neither too knowledgeable about the subject nor too naïve. Both options would have made him look bad.

“… and we still use a lot of our technology, it’s just not so obvious. But magic replaced a lot of things, true. And some, we don’t really need it anymore. Hey, kid, we’re approaching the fair; let’s hurry this interview.”

“Well, then tell me about the other races and their culture. And why we have a simpler religion than the other races.”

“Oh, dear!” sighed the captain. “This is a tricky subject… we are so guilty… so guilty… We should not have made contact. There was wisdom in those old fictions and their directives… Actually, kiddo, our religion is their original religion, and their culture is… I cannot even speak about it; it hurts. You see, when the Mind and we selected the crew and the workers, we chose people who were relaxed about this religious stuff. Fanatics are always a problem; they used to kill a lot of people back home, for all sorts of stupid reasons. So we didn’t have any… well, religious persons around. Here, well, seeing magic, people started to believe that there is a bigger force around who helped us. So we adopted the local thing, revering concepts like Providence, Goodness, Fortune, True Love… and so on. On the other hand, the locals were influenced by us a lot too. This frequently happens when a technically more advanced civilization meets underdeveloped tribes. Especially you, the kids were the worst. You bombarded them with your childish stories, and it caught. Each race adopted the nicknames you gave them because there are some resemblances between them and those fairy tales folks. But it was a cruel thing to do, Santiago, even if they like it. I almost cry every time I visit… ah, I even forgot their real name, the zhune? I think it was zhune how they called themselves. Now everybody calls them the elves. When I visit, they always sacrifice a deer in my honor, jumping on one foot and chanting: Hasta la vista, Bambi!… “

“I’m not the one who did it!” stated Santiago. “And don’t blame us when you are doing the same to magic, perverting its purity, putting it in a prison of words. So stupid!”

Feyra was crying, and Istainn put his hand around her shoulders, letting her sob on his shoulder.

“What is with you, sis?” asked Heyra.

“THE ELVES!” she shouted. “They are not really elves!”

“Yes, we understood. Get a grip! Let us see what’s going on.”

The man and the child had arrived on a big meadow. An open-air fair was going on. The biggest attraction was a group of five people on a stage, an elf, a beauhemian, a tall, good-looking woman, and a dwarf. They were holding hands, surrounding a fifth person, a man who was levitating knives with magic.

“Ah, he's my invocation teacher!” whispered the boy in the recording device. “Let me show him some real magic!”

The child snapped his fingers, and suddenly the daggers went astray and fell toward the man’s head. At the last moment, they transformed into soap bubbles. The crowd gasped, then applauded.

“Santiago!” exclaimed the man, angrily.

“What?” replied the kid. “It was not me!” he said in an evidently lying tone. "Shoot, the battery's gone!"

Three short sharp sounds, and the recordings stopped. The next time they pressed the triangle, it showed the first image.

“Goodness!” exclaimed Heyra. “This is… unbelievable.”

“It is!” growled the spy, “And most instructive.”

He snapped his fingers, and the windows opened. A shower of rose petals entered the toom, raining on the girls' heads.

“You’re doing magic!” exclaimed Feyra, still with tears in her eyes.

“Yes, I do. You know what I’ve said earlier about misjudging my cousin? I retract it all. He lied. Come. We need to talk in a more private place.”