The Wizard and Society
Once upon a time, in a distant future, there was a lonely sorcerer. He had everything; he lived soaked in privilege but that was all he had left of his former glory. What he coveted beyond everything else, however, was not the material goods that magic could still manifest for him but the control over other human beings who had evolved over the centuries freeing themselves from the irrational dependence on beliefs and magic.
One day Garlico, his monstrous-looking apprentice, an humble, shy but curious human, on whom the sorcerer tested new potions in exchange for the knowledge of the rudiments of magic, dared to contradict him at his misquotation about a spell to grow indestructible dragon scales on butterfly wings.
The sorcerer was bewildered and stupefied. The apprentice, the only person who still had the patience to stand with him, was right. It had never occurred to him to be corrected by any of his mortal assistants related to the cycle of birth and death and without being able to control his anger the sorcerer kicked him out.
It was in that very moment that he understood how to achieve what he had always wanted. He would cast a spell over the city capable of bringing ignorance into the minds of every person. In this way he would be the only one who knew things and humans would come back in need of him.
That's how began to creep among people the regression, the spell of absolute ignorance. People began to no longer understand each other. They were constantly losing attention, even to small things. Unable to make simple reasoning, after a short time, they would lose their temper. Incapable of accommodating different points of view every attempt to understand each other mathematically led to frustration and then to useless arguments. All exchanges of ideas, after many attempts, died out.
People stopped meeting each other, no longer considering friendship necessary; in fact, they no longer even understood its vey meaning. As time went on, regression made people incomprehensible to each other. The city, once rich in brilliant minds, full of talents and on the threshold of the greatest technological breakthroughs, became a place where everyone behaved animated by the lowest and most perverse instincts.
The spell became more and more powerful. The citizens, no longer feeling the need to walk on their two legs, from one day to the next, as in an epidemic, abandoned the upright position and began to walk on all four limbs.
The sorcerer had achieved his goal. Humans had returned to worshipping his occult powers and he had returned to being the answer to their fears, fears he himself had generated through the spread of ignorance caused by the regression.
Among the men who showed the most loyalty to him, thus among those on whom regression had had the most successful instupidization, he chose his armed guard: human beings to whom he had restored the upright position without removing the curse of regression with the aid of a painful exoskeleton that made them even more evil.
Garlico, the sorcerer's assistant, from much earlier sensed that something was wrong. His family had a greater protection to all spells, and this, in the turmoil caused by rampant stupidity, helped them to stay together. Like everyone else, however, Ibisca his companion and him had lost their upright position and were walking against their will by alternating their hands and feet on the ground.
Inexplicably, Meringa, their little girl, like all the other children in town, had not experienced the effects of the curse. None among them had become stupid nor begun to move on the ground like their parents.
The regression, however, was so powerful that even his knowledge of magic, even though it did not disappear completely, gradually, day after day, entered a kind of stagnation from which much of everything he had learned was difficult to bring back to memory.
Until the very end he had tried to save as many people as possible by starting this difficult task from their parents, from every friend and every friend’s family, so that they could escape with them.
In many cases he had been successful in waking them up from regression. Seeing the last attempts failing, he decided it was time to leave the city that had fallen completely under the influence of the sorcerer's spell and was controlled by his thugs in order to find a way to bring all the people back to reason at a later stage.
After a long night of a dialogue made by exchanging ideas and suggestions that the people present had almost lost the memory and pleasure of, gathered together in a circle in front of the fire and away from the influence of the evil spell that stretched for dozens and dozens of miles, the sorcerer's helper, his family, their parents with their friends and their friends' families, decided to gather the materials in the forest needed to build an indestructible robot thanks to the magic that the sorcerer's helper despite the regression still managed to remember: the spell to make dragon scales grow disproportionately on the wings of butterflies.
These were days of relentless work. The contribution of every person who fled the city to permanently escape stupidity was important. Every intelligence was needed and every person, tangibly humiliated still by their hind and fore limbs on the ground, was very aware of what was at stake.
They divided into teams assigning themselves tasks to meticulously build and test every detail. The outer armor, made of wood, was covered with billions of invincible dragon scales butterfly larvae that would hatch on the day of departure.
The internal structure of the robot was composed of joints made of dozens of cylinders and wheels, in all similar to those used to make hamsters stretch their legs, only much, much larger. The citizens, running inside them, were responsible for the robot's strength, which, thanks to them, moved the cyclopic-sized body.
The children, through whistles, flags and ropes were giving directions from the head towering above the clouds to their parents, adjusting the direction, speed and rhythm of each movement.
Garlico the sorcerer's apprentice, his companion and his daughter who began the revolt along with the other families, were preparing for the final battle.
Although it was supported by billions of butterfly wings that made each step of the robot much lighter than it actually was so to allow those inside to move it with ease, the air displacement due to its size, upon arriving on the outskirts of the city, woke up the sorcerer who was already awake in the early morning and eating breakfast. What was supposed to be a surprise attack therefore did not work perfectly.
Terrified by the size of the incredible being slowly approaching him, by the glow and twinkle of the wings that at that distance seemed to be a single wall of thunderbolt-filled clouds, before running away, in a selfish attempt to save his own life, he threw his thugs and the remaining citizens, who had become completely one dumber than the other in the meantime, at the giant within which dozens and dozens and dozens of women and men were moving in synchrony, running back and forth on the articulated wheels guided by the signals sent above by the children.
The wizard's henchmen, despite being endowed with superhuman strength thanks to their exoskeletons, attacked the giant's feet without being able to stop his advance. It was too well defended by the clouds of butterflies, the sorcerer's apprentice Galico, his family and his friends.
The stupidity of a fearful citizen, pushed into the battle in front of everyone else, who by that time was too stupid to coordinate his four limbs, made him stumble and and fall ruinously forcing the people behind him to fall over each other creating a true mountain of human stupidity.
The children leading the battle, from the high vantage point of the giant's head, tried to stop his advance so as not to step on all those clumsy people, but the sudden and contradictory orders confused along the gears those running in each wheel and as a result the giant fell to the ground too.
He was so big, so tall, that the distance the sorcerer had traveled on his escape was covered with the length of his fallen body lying down.
The sorcerer seemed to have won once again through the stupidity he had spread. The women and men operating the joints once rescued by the glittering clouds of the dragon butterflies, started to search among the giant pieces of armor on the ground for other survivors.
The giant was on the ground, broken, in pieces, scattered throughout the city. The giant head with the children inside had rolled all the way to the sorcerer.
Unharmed, counting each other several times to check no one was missing, they gathered their courage. Seeing him right in front of them, they decided to descend from the giant's mouth lowering themselves from pulleys and makeshift ropes for then taking each other hands and surrounding him.
They were aware of all the destruction he had caused. Of the state of stupidity to which he had reduced all their parents, and all this to feel unnecessarily more confident, more important.
They remembered every day of frustration, of sudden quarrels, of anger due to the lowest instincts in which their beloved parents had been forced making them almost unrecognizable beasts.
They saw them even that day, despite all their efforts to become better people by resisting the sorcerer's power, still reduced to walking with feet and hands on the ground.
Garlico and Ibisca's daughter came out of the circle of children and began to approach the sorcerer who was visibly incredulous of her courage.
Before the sorcerer could do anything she jumped on him, giving a very strong bite to the finger he had extended to her as a warning, while yelling at her not to come any closer.
At the sorcerer's boisterous shout, the children looked at each other and all burst into laughter. They had realized that even they, while not subject to the regression or being forced to walk on all four limbs, had attributed a tremendous significance to the arrogant man that had always stopped them from challenging his supposed powers.
The circle began to tighten on him until each one, taking a run-up and jumping on his body, some on his arm, some on his head, some on his legs, was occupied with biting off a small patch of his skin.
Busy screaming in pain, the sorcerer was incapable of pronouncing even the first verse of any spell to sweep them away and threw himself to the ground, rolling and jumping, to free himself from all those children biting him all over his body.
The shock of this inconceivable insult made him start trembling and drooling. Thick smoke began to come out of his mouth, his eyes and his ears from which all kinds of deformed monstrosities could be seen in transparency being aborted and bursting into pinkish, orange and greenish bubbles of lights until there were only his clothes left on the ground, which caught fire and turned to dust.
Of the sorcerer there seemed to be nothing left as of his regression spell. But this was nothing more than the first of ten thousand tricks and formulas he had learned centuries and centuries before, at a young age, when he was still not a sorcerer but a street performer who amazed the passers-by with simple prestige tricks such as disappearing.
Of course this time it had been a perfect tenfold disappearing act, with greater dramatic skills and stage effects, but it was still the good old disappearing act.
The influence of regression, once the sorcerer was gone, had also vanished from the city. On the battlefield his minions were returning to their senses and without understanding what had happened they greeted the citizens they had been fighting until moments before. The ones still covered in butterflies with dragon scale wings were explaining to the others roughly all the recent happenings, they all together headed where the giant's head had rolled running towards their children.
From that vantage point over the valley Garlico, his family and all the other citizens could witness together a very strange and unexpected sight. An old man, thin, bruised and somewhat burned, shouting nonsensical rambling words, was running toward the forest at great speed, unclothed, naked, like a savage. As the eyes of those present followed him take the path to the first trees, the scorched man seemed almost to accelerate what to everyone had the appearance of an inexplicable and very rapid degeneration. One step after the other, continuing to shout disconnected words, they saw him arch his back and start walking alternating his four limbs as he penetrated the inscrutable dense vegetation.
Garlico and Ibisca reached for the hands of Meringa, their daughter. They twirled her around in the air and then headed home carrying the robot's head with them assisted in the transport by the butterflies with wings covered in dragon scales. Meringa deserved a bigger bedroom after the bite on the sorcerer's finger. That had indeed been a courageous action that had to be rewarded.