First day of kindergarten, they took my blood and ran it through a big machine. I remember being scared of it, the way it clanked and whirred and growled when they fired it up. A hundred vials of blood in a centrifuge, spinning until it looked like a solid red wheel.

One by one, the vials flared under white light. Each time a sample went by, the machine spat out a card, red or blue. I was only six, but I knew what that meant. People who got a blue card never had to worry about jobs or friends or money again. A blue card meant you had magic inside you. A blue card meant you were special.

I spent my childhood dreaming about what I would do with my powers, but I got a red card, just like everybody else. I crumpled it in my hand and cried as the nurse led me out. My mother was in the lobby, waiting with all the other mothers in my class. I remember the fear on her face. She had a fresh tissue in her hand and a pile of wadded tissues at her feet. The floor was littered with red cards, discarded like petals from a perfect square rose.

Mom saw the card in my hand and started to cry. I thought she was sad, but she picked me up and spun me around, laughing tears of joy. It didn’t make sense. Mom was happy that I got a red card, happy that I wasn’t special. I didn’t know why until my twenty-fifth birthday, the day the demons came.

* * *

I spent my childhood in a disjointed dream world of movies, music, and comic books. I had elaborate daydreams about magic and hero stuff, but I didn’t really understand it. Magic was the province of heroes and freaks - celebrities and criminals and people on TV. Magic was everywhere, but ordinary people could go their whole lives without touching it.

People on the street saw two kinds of magic: awesome viral super fights with gifted criminals, and the open stage at Harvard Square - street wizards and armchair illusionists, conjuring pornographic wood nymphs and dragons made from computer chips.

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Eight billion people in the world, but less than one percent had magic inside them. One of every two thousand people had the power, and most of those were genetic savants - low-power novelty acts who can rig dice games or light matches from across a room. Maybe ten percent of gifted people could do something useful, and less than five percent of those could learn spells. Normal people can’t really see the runes that let you cast magic. They’re just simple shapes unless you have the right kind of chemistry in your brain. You can’t learn the power. You have to be born with it.

In 2058, the year I turned twenty-five, there were six hundred mages in the United States. Half of them had trained at Newbury Tower, next door to Boston University, where I was maintaining my awesome 2.89 GPA, training to be a database engineer.

Boston was considered the most magical place in America, thanks to some kind of unfinished portal that manifested like a magical geyser, blasting raw power into the sky every few hours, increasing the background magic in the atmosphere, making this the easiest place to learn and use magic in the United States.

Still, even in Boston, magic was something that happened to other people. You could see news stories about demon summoning and magic duels, but after a while, magical events took on the character of lightning strikes and plane crashes. You knew magic was happening somewhere, but you never thought it would happen to you.

I lived a mundane life for twenty-five years, so when the magic came down on me, I didn’t know what to look for. Ancestors from previous centuries would have seen it, but halfway through the twenty-first, magic was dismissed as old-fashioned, even a little embarrassing, like an old hit record that your parents used to like.

Mages were treated like fallen royalty. They turned their noses up at technology, while scientists were racing to make them obsolete. Science got better results, and it had a better reputation. Magic was genetic. Science was for everybody.

All the best jobs were in robotics, but I was hopeless with tools. I was caught in the middle, in love with magic, but snared by technology. I was a college dropout with half a degree in database management, seduced by a job that took me out of school with the promise of corporate perks and easy money.

All my red cards had been stored away, hidden in my closet with barely adequate report cards and a box of old toys. I tried to eat lunch in front of the tower sometimes, but they put me in my place the first day. They didn’t need another poser in the tower. I could kiss ass and daydream all day, but I would always be mundane.