In the end it was magic that saved the planet Earth. Oh, not hocus-pocus and abracadabra, but magic nonetheless...the real kind. Universe magic. The stuff that's always been there since the beginning of time, although time has no true beginning, and that's another part of the story. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I have been appointed as chronicler of the events that transpired, so I'll try to tell it as best as I can, though it isn't a tale that lends itself to easy explanations.

The Twenty-first Century was a time of magic - magic run amok really, and so nobody saw it that way, or recognized it for what it was. They called it science. But it was magic too - a kind of the magic that saved the earth, though it came damn near to destroying it. The human race found science-magic before they were quite ready for it - before they had come to terms with other gentler parts of the Greater Magic, before they were able to really understand the way the whole thing worked, and how delicate a balance was required. You see, they hungered for knowledge, as they had been programmed to do. They longed for more, always more.

What they weren't able to realize until it was almost too late was that it was all there inside themselves, everything they dreamed of and desired.