Free Off to Be the Wizard - 2 - Spell or High Water by Scott Meyer Page A

Gwen said. “Our leader, Brit, will be running the show. She’s pretty good at this sort of thing.”
    “It’s a shame your leader has to do that instead of acting as a delegate for Atlantis.”
    Gwen laughed. “Oh, she’s also one of our delegates.”
    Wait,” Phillip said. “Isn’t anyone worried that she might somehow, I don’t know, favor herself?”
    Gwen said, “Believe me, it’s not a problem. She seldom agrees with herself. Here’s the boat.” Gwen gestured toward the end of the dock, which seemed at a glance to have no boats moored to it. When Phillip and Martin actually looked, though, they could see another transparent bowl bobbing in the water. This one was much larger than the one Phillip had received. Even knowing it was there, it was more visible for the shadow it cast and the furrow in the water where it sat than for actually being visible itself. If Martin squinted, he could just make out a transparent floor and a shelf-like bench wrapping around the inside.
    Gwen walked to the end of the dock, slipped on her sandals, and stepped over the rim, into the near-invisible boat. Martin and Phillip followed suit. When they were all seated Gwen said, “Take me home.” The boat silently lifted a foot or so above the surface and started moving, fast enough to make real progress, but slowly enough that the wind was not unpleasant.
    Phillip looked at the edge of the flying bowl-boat and asked, “Is this made of diamond too?”
    Gwen smiled. “Yeah. It’s laid down one molecule at a time by an automated algorithm. Makes incredibly strong structures, and if you think it through well enough you can make almost anything . Also, because they’re so molecularly pure, you can manipulate, levitate, or teleport them at will with no danger of them breaking apart. It was one of the Brits’ first great innovations.”
    Phillip puffed up a bit with nationalistic pride. “We Brits invented this? When?”
    Gwen chuckled. “Not the British. The Brits. Two of our leaders are named Brit.”
    “Oh,” Martin said, “like the Magnuses.”
    “No,” Gwen said. “Nothing like the Magnuses. This is one of the things I wanted to warn you about.” Gwen sighed heavily , thought for a moment, then plunged ahead. “See, there are three people in charge of Atlantis. They form a sort of voting council. There’s the President, whom we all elect. At the moment it’s a woman named Ida. Then there’s Brit, our real leader. She founded Atlantis and is the smartest person I’ve ever met. She’s there out of respect. She built the whole place herself. She’s, well, she’s just amazing. You’ll see.”
    Martin said, “And the third, the other Brit. What’s her deal?”
    Gwen winced. “See, that’s the hard part to explain. There is no other Brit. It’s the same Brit. Brit is two people, or you could say she’s one person twice. See, Brit went back in time, like a hundred years ago, and built Atlantis. She designed it, did all of the engineering, made it all work. Then she went out into the world and encouraged people to move to the city and populate it. They set up homes and businesses, gave her creation life, and made it a real city. She built the buildings, then she made it into the city it is today.”
    “She sounds great,” Phillip said.
    “She is,” Gwen agreed. “The problem is that before she did all that, she came to the past for the first time, eleven years ago, and found Atlantis here, already up and running. Then she met herself and discovered that she had gone back in time and built Atlantis so that it would be ready for her when she arrived.”
    There was a long silence, which ended with Phillip yelling that this made no sense, and that the whole thing was preposterous, followed by Martin agreeing with Phillip, followed by Gwen agreeing with both of them, but assuring them that it was true, or at least it seemed to be.
    “Brit has a theory about how it happened. When she explains it, it makes