Magic may well have been real. Healing crystals, shamanry, witchcraft, voodoo, things of this nature may have been real at one point and have since been patched out. These could have simply been glitches in the program.
We’ve all heard of glitches in games that can be exploited that eventually get patched. Could have been real.
There was this old cold fusion joke that went something like that. Where a programmer notices someone getting free energy. They proceed to fix the bug, recompile and reboot. Fixing the problem.
Days late but I’ve found it
“Yo, Mike!” “Yeah, Gabe?” “We got a problem down on Earth. In Utah.” “I thought you fixed that last century!” “No, no, not that. Someone’s found a security problem in the physics program. They’re getting energy out of nowhere.” “Blessit! Lemme look… <tappity clickity tappity> Hey, it’s there all right! OK, just a sec… <tappity clickity tap… save… compile> There, that ought to patch it. Dist it out, wouldja?” – Cold Fusion, 1989