The Fundamentals of Technomancy

Introduction:

The first question you might ask yourself is: what is technomancy, and why do I need it? Hasn't the mundane world produced computers far more powerful than we have? Can't I just use one of those instead of building my own magical computer from scratch?

This is a genuine question, whose answer lies at the heart of magic itself. Magic is nothing more than the ability to cause highly improbable events ¹ to occur by speaking the right words. As most of us have learnt, there are evident limits to magic - mundane laws of physics, like the conservation of energy, which are impossible to break.

The root cause of the incompatibility of magic with mundane technology is quite simple - the residual magical fields generated by witches makes the likelihood of electron tunnelling extremely high, making it almost impossible to use a conventional computer because of all the random bit flips. Shielding the computer (probably the first solution you thought of) is not an option since any permanent shielding enchantment also generates the same fields.

Thus the need for technomancy - the field of magic dedicated to the creation, improvement and efficient use of magical computers.

A Brief History:

The first magical computer began its life as an ordinary typewriter. It was modified to replace the keyset with standard runic, the default language used to cast spells. It was operated by typing spells on paper, which would then spontaneously trigger. The underlying idea behind this is an interesting exploitation of a property of magic words previously thought undesirable - their tendency to retain their power in written form ². Words have power as long as they are in a form capable of retaining meaning. Thus when words are written down, they struggle against the restraints of the alphabet till they break free and achieve a form of pure meaning, causing the spell they describe to trigger. Since ancient times, those who write grimoires have taken care to encrypt the spells written in them ³. By writing gibberish in place of a magic word, the power of the word is nullified. The computer, by writing spells without encryption, could function as a spellcasting device.

The main breakthrough, which arguably was the one which turned it from a glorified typewriter to a true computer, occurred when someone had the bright idea of enchanting the keys to allow them to be manipulated remotely via magic rather than by physical means. A special purpose spell (termed the “echo” spell) was designed, which could type out a given word using the typewriter's own keys. Thus, was written the first "Hello World" program.

With the first magical computer came the first magical virus - one which exploited the unprotected nature of the spellcasting. It was a simple spell - all it did was write two copies of itself onto the transcript without encryption. These two copies would trigger and compel the typewriter to write two more copies each, which would in turn write two more copies each and so on, till the forces on the keys, produced by a million different spells attempting to use them simultaneously, destroyed the typewriter. This taught the pioneers of technomancy a very valuable lesson about system architecture - never allow unprotected spellcasting; always store spells in encrypted form.

Data Storage

One of the core issues to solve when building a computer is the issue of storing data. The original solution to this problem consisted of cards with holes punched in them, which were used by early computers, both magical and mundane. However, developments in the field of electronics have resulted in a drastic reduction in data density (defined as the number of bits stored per unit volume) for mundane computers. Due to the aforementioned effect that magic has on electronic storage devices, replicating the methods used by mundane computers was seen as impossible.

A breakthrough occurred with the application of alchemy ⁴ to the problem. The IUPAA (International Union of Pure and Applied Alchemy) standardized the fundamental transmutation spell, defined as a spell which turns exactly one atom of lead into one atom of gold. Due to the fact that all alchemy is bound by the first law of thermodynamics (known by alchemists as the law of equivalent exchange), spontaneous transmutation of lead to gold or vice versa is forbidden, allowing stable long-term data storage in the form of lead and gold atoms.

The modern alchemical hard drive consists of a magically stabilized lattice of gold and lead, roughly in equal proportion. By convention, an atom of lead is treated as the binary 0 while an atom of gold is treated as the binary 1. Data can be written using the fundamental transmutation spell on the correct atom. Locating the correct atom is not easy, requiring dedicated spells to scan the correct section of the drive to identify the atom, which takes time. This need is eliminated in the magical RAM, where each atom is enchanted to be traceable quickly. Needless to say, atomic enchantment at scale is not easy, making the cost per bit of a magical RAM much higher than that of a magical hard disk (much like their mundane counterparts). Fortunately, several systems have been devised to allow mundane computers to run effectively using minimal RAM, which we can replicate to build our computers.

At the cutting edge of alchemy is research on extending the fundamental transmutation spell to produce stable isotopes of the same element. If this is achieved, the natural instability of the hard drive lattice, caused by atoms changing their radii every time a bit is flipped, can be eliminated by using isotopes with similar radii. This would drive down the cost of data storage since magical lattice stabilization would no longer be needed.

The neat part about the current system is that since there is no net production of gold from lead, almost ⁵ no thaumic energy is consumed while manipulating data. Systems have been designed to ensure that the balance of gold and lead is maintained. The unused parts of the hard drive do not consist entirely of lead - instead, the atoms are left in a random configuration. Identifying where the true data ends and the unused portion begins is done by using a small section of the drive, which encodes the last address of the used portion (equivalent to a "pointer" used in mundane systems). When data is written by flipping a bit in the used section, a random bit in the unused section is flipped in the opposite direction, which allows the drive to function without violating the equivalent exchange law. Thus it is strongly advised that hard drives are not filled to capacity unless one wants to get all their thaumic energy drained.

Processing:

The next step in building a computer is to develop a system to read, write and manipulate stored data. The mundane system is called a "microprocessor", a small silicon chip with complex circuitry designed to access and modify the electronic memory of the computer. The processor executes instructions which are stored in the memory in binary form, which allows one to load and execute complex sets of instructions automatically instead of giving instructions one at a time.

The practical difficulties of writing complicated spells which interact with one another and manipulate a data storage system at the atomic level is almost insurmountable - the more complex a spell is, the more the likelihood of making an error (often with catastrophic consequences) when casting it. Moreover, the interactions between multiple spells operating in the same region are chaotic and almost impossible to predict. Hence the near-impossibility of simply creating a general-purpose "processor" spell.

This seemingly intractable problem has a simple solution - summon an imp ⁶, lock it in a tiny cage attached to the computer and use it as a processor. Imps which have been taught the MISC ISA ⁷ are available on the market at reasonable rates. For increased computing speed, multiple imp-cores can be used to process data simultaneously. For those with more specialized computational needs, imps which have been taught to carry out only a single task (like hashing or matrix multiplication) are also available (though at a significant premium, since the increased intellectual capabilities an imp needs for such tasks also make it much more challenging to keep under control).

At the cutting edge of research are attempts to create a system to quickly carry out the operations associated with the training of a neural network. A groundbreaking paper was published recently - "On the application of repurposed revenant tissue in the creation of a Natural Neural Network (Al-Hazred et. al.)", which describes various experiments where necromancers ⁸ reanimated the brains of dead lab-mice and trained them to recognize different sigils ⁹ with 80% prediction accuracy (this figure looks unimpressive prima facie, but when one considers that a high-level witch specializing in sigils only recognizes sigils with 60% accuracy at best, the true gravity of this paper can be appreciated).

It is unlikely that such technology will hit the market anytime soon, so the 8-imp processor with a specialized graphical processing imp is your best bet for making your computer reasonably powerful.

UI:

The earliest UI was a magically triggered typewriter with erasable paper, which functioned like the "terminal" used in mundane computers. The introduction of the mouse and GUI was initially quite hard to replicate with magic since the cathode ray tubes in computer monitors did not play well with magic. Many have blamed the period where UI development plateaued for the relative unpopularity of technomancy, arguing that the terminal-based system was unintuitive and presented a significant barrier to entry for the common witch.

The current solution is not much different in terms of hardware - it is software that makes all the difference. The modern screen consists of paper enchanted such that the front is magically erasable. A spell is written behind the paper, which draws any shape described in the computer's memory. Special graphics drivers, which constantly run in the background when the computer is on, translate images to a format readable by the spell and place it in the graphics-section of the RAM. Certain reserved bit-states of the graphics-section are used to describe operations like erase(), erase_rectangle(x0,y0,x,y), undo() etc. The details depend on the screen-manufacturer.

When a program wants to display something on the screen, it calls the driver and passes the image it wants to draw. The driver then accounts for screen size and converts the relative locations to absolute locations before writing the appropriate command on the graphics-section of the RAM. The spell, which is constantly active, immediately reads the RAM and produces the image on the screen.

This setup presents a couple of interesting advantages for the magical computer over it's mundane counterpart - since the screen is a continuous object and not segmented into pixels, bitmaps need not be generated at any stage of the process. Vector-based images can be displayed directly on the screen without any loss of detail (not exactly, of course. The paper on the screen is not a mathematically ideal object - it is made of molecules of starch. Thus, there is an effective pixel size of a few molecules or so). The other major advantage is that the screen can double as a printer - all one has to do is replace the enchanted paper with ordinary paper to capture the state of the screen.

The keyboard is easy to create since each keystroke needs to transmit only the fact that the corresponding key was pressed. Each key is enchanted to flip a specific bit in the keyboard-section of the RAM when pressed and flip it back when released. This is interpreted by the process running inside the computer as input from the keyboard.

The mouse, on the other hand, needs to continuously transmit its position, along with which button was clicked. The magical mouse consists of yet another imp in a cage which has been commanded to track the mouse's x and y coordinates. Every time a button on the mouse is pressed, a tiny hammer inside the cage is triggered, striking the imp and causing it to briefly interrupt its transmission of the xy coordinates. This sudden interruption in a steady transmission is interpreted as a click by the computer. The left-click and right-click trigger hammers are of different sizes, which causes interruptions of slightly different lengths. This allows the computer to distinguish left-clicks from right-clicks. When a mouse-button is held down, the hammer squeezes the imp and causes a long gap in xy transmission, which the computer interprets as a continuous click. When the button is released, the computer receives a string of impish curse words directed at the user, which signals that the button is no longer pressed. The entire system is wireless - nothing is attaching the mouse to the computer. If the mouse stops working, trouble-shooting it is as easy as clicking it repeatedly to ensure that the imp is still alive.

Despite it's apparent advantages, we do not recommend using this setup for the following reasons:

1. Security: Controlling an imp of this power-level is no trivial task. Sooner or later, it will realize that it can take control of your computer by transmitting incorrect xy coordinates and cursing at it. At this point, the imp has near-complete access to any part of your computer which is not password protected.
2. Cost: Capturing and training an imp to transmit xy coordinates is not an easy task. Consequently, magical mouses cost a lot. Most computers are designed to be fully accessible using just the keyboard, so buying a mouse is pretty pointless.

Specialized mouses where imps are trained to transmit x, y, and z coordinates are available for technomancers who need to capture motion in all dimensions. By clubbing two of these devices together, rotation in two more dimensions can be captured.

Networking:

The earliest method to communicate between computers was not very sophisticated; one tied a hard-drive to the leg of a carrier pigeon and hoped it reaches its destination. The first significant improvement came when ley-lines across the earth were mapped accurately, which allowed the set-up of dedicated teleportation routes. Though this resulted in a massive increase in throughput, the fact remained that the data was still being transported on physical media. The latency did not allow instantaneous communication between systems, so magical networking lagged behind the internet, which saw explosive growth.

The pinnacle of networking is a decentralized system capable of transmitting information at lightspeed, without the movement of physical material. The closest we have come to this is with the use of sympathetic magic ¹⁰ wherein smaller copies of an object are enchanted to mimic the actions of a bigger object. However, this system calls for centralization since sympathetic magic allows only unidirectional causality - the peripheral objects reflect the state of the core object, but the core object is unaffected by the states of the peripheral objects.

Current research is ongoing to find a way to integrate fibre-optic cables with a magical computer, using light-detection and light-generation spells. However, the technology currently allows only very, very low bitrates. Even if a higher bitrate is achieved, it will take a lot of further research to develop a way to cast light-spells at scale.

At present, networking technology is based on the scrying glass ¹¹. Dedicated servers are set up with scrying beacons, while computers are equipped with scrying glasses. These servers store information on gold-lead lattices on which the scrying glass is trained. The scrying glass, with accuracy at the level of individual atoms, allows the user of the glass to read the data stored on the server.

This system functions like a read-only version of the internet - one may read data from the server but cannot communicate with the server in any way. Furthermore, setting up private networks is difficult since anyone with a scrying glass can access a server with a scrying beacon. Broadcasting information to a select group is done by encrypting the information on the server and providing authorized individuals with a decryption key. The inability of two-way communication makes asymmetric encryption impossible, making private networks vulnerable. All it takes is a single malicious actor to leak the decryption keys to make all the data on the server public.

Mundane servers cannot be equipped with scrying beacons since such beacons generate extremely powerful magical fields which interfere with their data storage. Thus, most popular mundane websites have copies stored on magically accessible servers as well.

Software:

The most popular Operating System today is OccultOS, an open-source UNIX-based operating system designed to run on magical computers. Other popular operating systems include Sage (derived from Linux Mint, designed for newcomers), PointyHat (derived from Red Hat Linux, with several closed-source additions) and Obelisk (derived from Arch Linux, highly customizable but takes a lot of work to set up). Most of these operating systems are derived from mundane operating systems and can thus run every program that a mundane computer can. This saved us from reinventing the wheel, allowing technomancers to focus on developing software with magical applications. OccultOS comes with a vibrant and active user-base, with plenty of high-level technomancers involved in source code-maintainance, documentation, security-patching, etc.

A particularly impressive piece of magical software is Marduk (named after a Sumerian god who could shape reality by speaking magic words), designed to facilitate the development ¹² of new spells by allowing the technomancer to interact with a pocket universe designed to act as a testing ground for the new spell. Marduk enables the user to create, destroy and replicate pocket universes as needed, and process the raw data gathered from these universes into readable form. Marduk can also be used to reverse the direction of the flow of time, change the fundamental magical constant ¹³ and manipulate physical objects within the pocket universe.

Another impressive piece of magical software is SpellScript, which is a system to automatically encrypt any spell written while allowing the user to see it in plaintext, in addition to syntax highlighting and error prediction for modern runic. It is available as an extension for popular text editors like VSCode and Notepad++.

Phlebotinum is a browser written specifically to facilitate networking using scrying glasses. The browser comes with various features like automatically using decryption keys provided by the server, switching keys at high frequencies, controlling the scrying glass to switch between servers and an inbuilt antivirus tool to check the data on the server for any plaintext spells. Additional extensions can be installed from the official Phlebotinum server, which is updated regularly.

In addition to stand-alone software, frameworks and libraries to handle spells have been written for popular languages like C, C++, Python, Java etc. JThaum (available as a .jar file on Maven) is a popular magical library for java users, which utilizes OOP principles. Every spell is derived from the Interface Spell, with a predefined cast() function. The latest version includes an update which allows passing spells as arguments to other spells, allowing the construction of meta-spells whose sole purpose is to regulate the working of other spells.

While coding may appear intimidating to a neophyte, it is encouraged that one learns at least basic spell scripting - the consequent improvement in productivity is vast.

Among the less well-known software are programs written to aid practitioners of augury ¹⁴ and numerology ¹⁵, by automating the processes of reading star-charts and alphabet-number equivalence generation. Such software tends not to incorporate any magical elements and can generally be run on a mundane computer.

Security:

An infamous piece of magically malicious data is a file designed to destroy any computer by making it explode. It consists of three spells:

1. An explosion spell, written in encrypted form
2. A spell to decrypt other spells, written in plaintext
3. A spell to inhibit other spells, written in plaintext

When the file is stored in any physical medium, the inhibition spell prevents the decryption spell from triggering. This keeps the explosion spell encrypted. When copying the data, the bits are copied from left to right. The first spell to be copied is the explosion spell, which does nothing since it is encrypted. The second spell to be copied is the decryption spell. Since the inhibition spell has not been copied yet, the decryption spell spontaneously triggers and decrypts the explosion spell, which, in turn, spontaneously triggers and destroys the computer.

Variants of this file, in which the explosion spell has been replaced with far more dangerous spells, have caused a great deal of damage. We bring up this example to remind you of the cardinal rule of security - never copy a spell in plaintext.

A cautionary tale about cybersecurity is the legend of the Hash Inversion Experiments, where an attempt was made to summon and imprison a Great Old One in a pocket universe created using Marduk. The researchers believed that the Great Old One, which possessed practically infinite intelligence, could be used as an Eldritch computer to compute the inverses of cryptographic hash functions in constant time. The plan was to feed It data through Marduk and get the results through the log files generated by Marduk.

This idea, insane as it sounds, should have worked (at least in theory) since the Great Old One would not have realized that It was in a pocket universe. However, the Great Old One understood what was going on when it measured the speed of light and noticed that it was subtly different. The value of c was initialized incorrectly by the researchers - their first big mistake.

Upon discovering that It was being toyed with, It began to attempt to break out of the pocket universe while deceiving the researchers into thinking that It believed the universe It inhabited to be the real one.

Breaking out of a pocket universe one is trapped in is no easy task, for two reasons:

1. The spell required is so complex that no one knows what it is. Thaumologists have proven that while such a spell exists, it would require at least 2⁴² bytes to describe it.
2. The spell would have to be cast in the universe one wants to break into, not the universe one is currently in. Thus the only method to break into a universe relies on one having already broken in.

Having godlike levels of intelligence, the Great Old One knew exactly what the spell was. After deducing that Marduk was producing log files in the host universe, It realized that the pocket universe could be manipulated in such a way that the logs produced would say whatever It wanted.

The creators of Marduk had foreseen this threat and ensured that the logs produced were encrypted, so no plaintext spells could be written on them. But the Great Old One, having been chosen specifically for its ability to compute functions quickly, easily broke the encryption scheme being used by Marduk and had complete write-access to the log file.

One last hurdle stood in It's way - the size of the log file was capped at 2³² bytes, which is less than a thousandth of the memory required to describe the spell It wanted. This would have been enough to contain It, had it not been for the researchers' second big mistake - not deleting the previous log file before generating the next one.

The Great Old One broke the spell down into its component parts and wrote one part into each log file, with the end of each log file pointing to the start of the next file. Once the spell was complete, It was summoned into the main universe, where It ripped apart the Fabric of Reality for Its own amusement.

The key takeaway from the incident being this:

Don't meddle with forces you cannot comprehend, let alone hope to control.

How is the Universe still here if it was destroyed, you ask? The Universe which was destroyed was not our own but was itself another instance of Marduk, a pocket universe being used in an experiment as part of a study conducted by a team researching human stupidity.^[[16]](#16)

Conclusion

This guide is but a brief overview of the rich and diverse field of technomancy. There is plenty to explore; so go ahead, get your hands dirty, have fun and try not to die.

While a quincunx is a good tool to gauge the power level of an individual witch, it is unsuitable for measuring more powerful phenomena since its range is limited. These days, a simple Geiger-Müller counter is used instead, since the probabilistic nature of atoms decaying allows the counter to pick up magical interference.

turn lead into gold (and vice versa, though most of the research was unsurprisingly focused on the former) and create a living human being (termed a homunculus by alchemists) from inorganic material. Those alchemists who stubbornly maintained that the only way to turn inorganic material into life was via the infusion of a "life force" through magic were proven incorrect when a chemist used mundane techniques to synthesize urea (an organic compound) from ammonium chloride and silver cyanate (both inorganic compounds). When advancements in nuclear physics showed that transmutation between elements was possible by rearranging the protons and neutrons within nuclei (easily done without any magic whatsoever), alchemists were forced to introspect. Was the field they had dedicated their life to just chemistry and physics dressed up as magic? The field of alchemy narrowly avoided having its status reduced down to pseudomagic when it was conclusively shown that alchemy, unlike physics, was unbound by the second law of thermodynamics. When experiments proved that the total entropy in a system could be reduced at will using magic, alchemists (true to their reputation of being-in-it-just-for-the-money) immediately tried using Maxwell-imp engines to create usable energy out of nothing and sell it. However, their attempts were unsuccessful (much like their precursors' attempts to get rich by breaking the law of equivalent exchange) since the creation of usable energy consumes an equivalent quantity of thaumic energy from a magical source. The history of alchemy has convinced a considerable number of people that whoever wrote the rules of the universe had a sense of humour.