The year was 2031. And while it would have been not unlike any another year, what made it remarkable was the Magic Lens market release. Although to be fair, it wasn’t your normal release. The blueprints, documentation, and everything else for the breakthrough device appeared out of the blue on Reddit on September 1, 2031, instantly spreading across the internet like wildfire.

Who posted the dump? Who created the device, one that hides smartphone-esque computing power and microLED image quality in what look like plain contact lenses? Half a century later, that remains a mystery.

All we have is a screen name: Prophet.

Growth shot through the roof for the company manufacturing Magic Lenses. Software was supplied by a variety of developers, including some industry giants.

In just one year, the Magic Lens became as ubiquitous as smartphones. Many people got rid of their smartphones, in fact.

But it was then, on September 1, 2032, one year to the day after Prophet posted the lens blueprints to Reddit, that he struck again with a new piece of software for the Magic Lens.

It was open-source, available to everyone absolutely free of charge.

We all remember how quickly the entire world downloaded it.

But when they installed it…

At first, everyone thought it was a game.

It took two or three days of people having a blast destroying monsters, using magic, and beating dungeons to realize that it actually wasn’t. It was reality.

It was reality revealed by the Magic Lens.

Some governments tried to ban the lenses and their software, but Prophet had taken care of that by making everything open-source and available online. It would have been easier to shut down the internet than to keep humanity from their magic.

That’s when the research began.

Magic had always been around, it turned out. The problem was that with each generation, fewer and fewer humans were capable of seeing, feeling, and sensing it.

As a result, the magic that had once been an inherent part of everyday life was confined to legends and fairy tales. The mortal world and the magic world co-existed as two sides of the same coin, only never interacting with each other. Humans, with very rare exceptions, were unable to spot the magic creatures. The latter kept their distance.

To be fair, the exceptions on the magic side were far more common. That explained why about ten million people around the world went missing every year, never to be heard from again.

The magic creatures, vampires and all the rest, needed food. Vampires require an absurd amount of blood just to stay alive, while werewolves… Well, they’re in a category all to themselves.

The Magic Lens restored the gift of magic to humanity. Research showed that its ability to transform mysterious magic into ordinary numbers and figures was based on quantum uncertainty, hyperposition, string theory, ray gravity, and the distortion of time-space by speed, or the gravitational difference between two points. There’s more, but the list gets even more incomprehensible from there.

In 2032, regardless, magic once again became a normal part of life on Earth again.

Humans suddenly discovered that the Ural, Himalayans, and Andean Mountains are inhabited by dwarves, and the forests of Canada and Siberia by elves. Fish swim side by side with mermaids, nagas, kappas, and other magic creatures. And it isn’t just birds soaring through the skies; there are also dragons, phoenixes, griffins, and even creatures whose names had long since disappeared from legends and fairy tales.

Ogres. Trolls. Wargs. Goblins. Orcs. Fairies. Giants. Cyclopes. Medusas. Centaurs. Cyclopes…did I mention them already? Regular old humans were suddenly in contact with all of them.

Remember Tony Stark’s speech in one of those superhero movies? (How quaint they look today.) You know, the guy in the iron suit who started by fighting normal people before moving on to superhumans, aliens, and even gods. That trajectory, it turns out, extends much further than previously thought.

But magic has been advancing by leaps and bounds since 2032. Humans have been working on it. Studying it. Believing in it. (At least, if the clerics and other zealots of the Word are right about everything on Earth being moved by Faith.)

In other words, magic didn’t become just another part of life on New Earth. It worked its ways deeply into every aspect of life, developing and transforming as it went. The age of digital technology was followed by the age of magic and technology integration.

They even found Atlantis.

Sure, it wasn’t that hard. For thousands of years, the state of Atlantis had been thriving on a continent hidden from the mortal world under the water, with just its tip protruding above the waves for everyone—New Zealand.

It also turned out that the old non-magical technology we used to use had failed to grasp Earth’s full size. The planet is almost half again as large as people used to think.

Scientists went back to the drawing board, poring over what they thought they knew to combine physical laws with the laws of magic and sorcery.

Just to take one example, no one yet knows why the larger Earth discovery didn’t change the number of days in a year, the number of hours in a solar day, or even gravitational acceleration.

Fifty years later, in 2081, our stack of unsolved riddles still dwarfs the ones we’ve figured out the answers to.

But humans went on living.

They learned magic at the schools of witchcraft and wizardry. They visited the lands of sapient magic creatures. They hunted non-sapient magic creatures. They explored dungeons. They loved. They betrayed. They gave birth. They died.

They fought wars, too.

Back in 2040, the First Magic War changed the global map and all but destroyed the planet. More on that later.

Reddit was successful in its mission to change the world. (For better or worse? Hard to say.)

Some are still adamantly set against the usage of Magic Lenses, rejecting all forms of magic. But they’re few and capable of nothing more than scattered terrorist attacks.

We’ve already gone through two generations—and there’s a third maturing—for whom magic is just as commonplace as the internet once was. (Of course, the internet is still around.)

Just don’t be surprised if you come across an elf wearing sneakers and a baseball cap, drinking Starbucks, and tapping away at a Mac laptop. Of course, you’re still unlikely to come across one like that, be it in New York, Tokyo, London, or Moscow, unless you can get your hands on a pass for the city sector occupied by the magic races. That’s your best shot.

The only place where you can bump into someone from one of the magic races is Myers City, the capital of Atlantis deep in the Pacific Ocean. The birthplace of magic.

But how did magic come to be?

Who was the Prophet?

Why was the Magic Lens created?

Alex Doom, also known as Alexander Dumsky, had no idea.

And who is Alex Doom?

Good question.