There’s an App for That

Apparitions. Ghosts. Angels. Demons. All living among us, but nobody really sees them.

Until now.

The story of how I created an app that captures the images of these beings is one born out of an accident.

It happened during what some people call The Eradication.

Magic, the ultimate weapon of the resistance fighter, didn’t just start happening. At least, that’s not how I look at it.

When people began to download MagicAct and see real, live, images of angels and demons, a big segment of humanity began to tap into that part of our universe. It’s a part of our universe that has always been there. The only reason it has been out of reach is that people didn’t believe.

People began taking pictures of the beings who are responsible for so-called coincidences. Next, they began to tap into their power.

It is giving us a fighting chance in this Eradication. It is giving us hope.

“It works like this.” I was showing it to Zor, who likes to say his real name is his online name, “ballsyUnicorn”, which probably tells you all you need to know about Zor.

I mean, Zor is the type of dude who spent hours online watching twenty-year-old girls dance on Twitch, joining various streams of comments with remarks that didn’t quite get him blocked. That was before the Eradication started. You’d expect that a dude like that isn’t going to last long, but here he is. Sometimes you just never know what’s inside a person until a crisis hits.

I attached a lens piece to my iPhone. We — my company, were able to get it approved for sale by marketing it as a zone analysis tool. The little lens attachment was supposed to analyze a zone to determine the number of Eradication survivors, and send reports to The Bureau.

Some zones are supposed to be completely free of people, and the idea was that the tool would be used as a citizen’s spyglass of sorts. When it didn’t work as advertised, the government simply ignored it.

“We worked with these dudes out of Switzerland,” I was saying to Zor. “This thing captures at a frame rate equivalent to five trillion images per second. It can capture things moving faster than light into images.” My company wrote the software, the Swiss produced the camera and my friends in Bangalore developed the chip.

“So? I mean, what’s the point?” Zor. Always the deep thinker.

“Well, most phone cameras do about 120 frames per second. On a good day. See, the device here encrypts flashes of light. Every time one of these coded flashes hits an object, the object bounces an image signal containing the same precise encoding. Then, all the image signals are gathered into one single photograph. You know, one frame. Then the chip inside the device separates all these signals into individual image frames.” Really fast, I didn’t bother saying.

“Outstanding,” said Zor sarcastically. He was probably trying and failing to imagine a girl dancing at the speed of light, and completely unable to see the utility in this.

Honestly? I didn’t see much utility in it, either. The project was a bit of a lark. Something to do.

Most of the things still happening on the internet were similarly random, happening through cell towers and neighborhood antennas strung up and torn down by the authorities and strung up again. It was all very clandestine. These days it is almost all gone but not before the app had managed to accomplish its unplanned mission. The internet still worked. Things could go viral.

And they did.

And the angels have spoken.

Enough people bought the device and app that they began to take very interesting pictures and movies. Demons entering the mouths of their hosts. Or swirling wildly around people in motion as if trying to guide them. Crowds of them would gather around politicians and military personnel and the people who supervised the Eradication bots.

Some of the apparitions that were captured in these images moved without moving. If they appeared still, they were not, in truth, still at all.

They existed in one part of a movie in one space for an infinitesimal moment, then in another moment in just the slightest different position. It was as if they were part of an edited video. It was as if they were lifted out of their space and dropped into the exact same position one millimeter apart from the original place.

But what they were really doing was moving place to place at speeds we can’t see with the human eye.

These differences were only discovered through analysis by dedicated servants of a still uncertain cause. You couldn’t see the changes with the naked eye, not really. You needed video capturing software to find the tiny displacements.

I can’t tell you what inspired people to analyze these things. Maybe it was just the bizarre nature of the images. A good many people assumed they were staged. But the recorded sightings became so common that people realized that they were real.

The demons, especially the demons, were everywhere. Swarms of them, like a pestilence, haunting everyone and everything, twenty-four hours a day.

People stopped analyzing and just focused on shooting and distributing their shots over what was left of the internet.

Angels were seen, too, but they seemed rare. And, frustratingly, they didn’t seem to be interfering much with demonic activity. It was like they just allowed this invasion to happen. Most people eventually concluded that the invasion was simply a permanent presence.

One person posted an image of a huge angel, a grey man with a beard and a wildly colored costume, whose presence consumed an entire hospital room as he rested his hand on the forehead of a small child. It is said that the image made a million people cry.

It is also said that it was the beginning of the human migration to a place dubbed MagicLand. Not a place, a thing. A way to tap into the magic of the good souls of the universe. A way to fight back.