Ten Gentle Opportunities

Caught cheating a powerful magician out of ten nuggets of pure uncommitted magic in a rigged card game, Bartholomew Stypek needs a place to hide. As a spellbender he is a partial magician, who can read and change magic spells, but absent a stash of magical force, cannot cast his own. With his anarchic familiar spirit Pickles and the ill-won magical Opportunities, Stypek leaps blindly across universes…and lands in the break room of a small ad agency in upstate New York.

Because New York State doesn’t support spirits, Pickles manifests as the nearest local equivalent: AI software in the agency’s heavily networked copier. She wanders into a nearby corporate network looking for allies, and discovers a virtual universe where AIs live off-hours. Pickles is soon seducing Simple Simon, a naive AI tasked with controlling an immense robotic assembly line in the corporation’s manufacturing plant. Stypek, meanwhile, is mistaken for a penniless Eastern European computer science intern, and is taken in by Carolyn Romero, the ad agency’s copywriter. Expecting the usual suspicion and contempt, Stypek is humbled by the kindness he’s shown, and one by one uses the Opportunities to help his new friends with their problems, including Carolyn’s failed marriage.

But Jrikk the magician isn’t so easily thwarted. Soon Stypek, Pickles, Simple Simon, Carolyn, and their human and AI friends must fight for their lives against the evil force sent to retrieve Stypek to the magician’s dungeons.