27th October 1995 (63:FL:1)
— Contact plus 00.01.25:01.00
As the observers filed into the lecture hall — the Dutch Prime Minister, a Deputy Prime Minister from Belgium and a Deputy President from Germany, various diplomatic staff in the Netherlands from several countries around the world, as well as representatives from the magical governments of Holland, Britain, and Saxony, and a third group of roughly equal size composed of people in military uniforms from multiple European countries, none of whom she was familiar with by sight — Hermione did her best not to fidget. She'd mostly managed to get over feeling terribly out of her depth, like she didn't belong here, but standing down with the presenters in front of this crowd was making her very uncomfortable. She should feel pleased, even proud that the project had come together so well, that they'd solved it, and she had been yesterday, talking to Dad about it.
The politically important people tailed by staff and bodyguards and the military people with the complicated-looking insignia (high-ranking officers, clearly) were just making her a touch nervous.
As soon as the idea for an entirely magical radio had occurred to Hermione, putting together the basic plan with Elbert, Gwen, and Marcel right there in the conference room, they'd jumped right into making a rough proof of concept. Hermione had contributed the original idea, though her input in designing the enchantment from there had been relatively minimal — she was in the room during discussions about it, but the others in their little team were far more experienced than her, they knew what they were doing. She did help draw out the physical design, primarily focussed on the internal mechanisms — the reservoir stones were on a specialised gear system, allowing the user to switch channels easily, reservoirs brought in and out of alignment — but also the external case that held it all, complete with some shielding to protect it against damage, as well as arranging the display and the dials in a way that would be intuitive to use for muggles.
That had required a crash course in how to use the metal-working and plastic-moulding equipment they had here at the University — their ultimate goal was to use alchemical ceramics whenever possible, as they could get better durability with less weight, but for these early tests whatever materials were available were fine. Hermione had worked with a muggle team for most of that, both since they were more familiar with the equipment in question and also as an additional aspect of the test. Mages were only a tiny fraction of the population, and while there were plenty with nothing better to do who could be recruited to do enchanting as needed, they'd be able to massively increase their production capabilities if most of the work could be done by muggles, who were much, much more numerous. With the way economies all over the world had basically crashed overnight, there were plenty of idle hands around, it wouldn't be difficult to find enough people willing to help.
Enchanting could, theoretically, be done by muggles — it was technically a form of ritual, which worked by drawing magic in from the environment, requiring none from the user themselves — but to most mages that was only theory. Most would accept that squibs could successfully enchant, but there was a persistent belief among mages that squibs were somehow fundamentally different from muggles, which...Hermione didn't think they were? Some muggle-avoidance spells didn't work on squibs, but those tended not to work on muggles either, so long as they were in the know — the spells shielding the Leaky Cauldron had affected her parents the first time they'd visited, but not any time after that. That would seem to suggest that the relevant factor was the target's understanding of magic, which had interesting implications Hermione didn't really have the attention to consider just now.
The alchemy that went into their completed device here had been done by Marcel, but the enchanting had entirely been done by Hermione's muggle helpers. (Mostly engineering students here at the time of the attack, sticking around to help.) Hermione had essentially needed to teach them all how enchanting worked from scratch — both as a general concept, as well as the meaning of the particular glyphs that went into this device and how they worked together — which had required a few hours of off-the-cuff lecturing (to people as much as a decade older than her), a couple days of practice with simple enchantments before moving on to the real thing. Their first attempt hadn't turned out quite right, but only about a week after the idea had first occurred to Hermione they'd had a rough but functional proof of concept, quickly made a second one to make sure it worked properly.
They'd shown that to Payne and the rest of the team, everyone dutifully impressed, and excited that they'd finally had a breakthrough in one of their big projects. Payne had immediately demanded they design a portable version — the proof of concept version hadn't been sealed in a case, the parts sitting open on a table — as small and user-friendly as they could make it, and work up some schematics they could send off to teams around the world. Once they had everything arranged, Payne would get the big-wigs in, they'd present the finished project — and if everything went well, they'd work up a plan to begin mass production, distribute them off around the world. It'd taken maybe a day and a half to sketch out a more compact design, another day for a computer person to help Hermione break it apart into a readable digital schematic — somewhat to her surprise, Thijmen managed to fit the whole thing onto a single floppy disc, a second disc for some supplemental alchemy details (also, Hermione knew basic computer-aided drafting now) — which was then carefully radioed out to other teams all around the world, who began building their own prototypes, in short order prepared for a full test of the device.
From Hermione's first thoughts to proof-of-concept to prototype to a test broadcast to the opposite end of the world had only taken a few weeks. It felt like time had positively flown by, Hermione absorbed in the details of the design and poking around modern industrial machinery she'd only been vaguely aware of the existence of before and teaching a slew of muggles basic magic theory and enchanting. She'd lost track of the passing of the days, hadn't realised she hadn't even left the University in a week and a half until she'd dropped by Rock-on-Clyde to get fresh clothes and was practically swarmed by Weasleys. Hermione getting buried in her studies was hardly a new phenomenon, but having an idea being so close to a finished product, watching all the pieces come together step by step, was almost intoxicating — there were days she'd entirely forgotten to sleep, only realising it was morning again when someone mentioned breakfast.
And the device was done. A simple beige and grey case, about the size of a red box — it was theoretically possible to make it smaller than that, but at that point etching the necessary runes into the gears would start getting rather tedious. Perhaps a little unwieldy for a private citizen to carry around, but they were far more mobile than standard magical 'radio' transmitters, and they shouldn't be too difficult to add to the equipment muggle soldiers were used to carrying around. And they would have a communications device that required no power, no rare earth minerals, was easy and intuitive to use, and had a range of, theoretically, the entire planet. Assuming it worked as they expected it would, anyway.
Though just because they'd come up with a functional communications device didn't mean they were done. Elbert had already worked up a design for an amplification system that could be used to project the sound over a larger area, to be used for public announcements and the like, and Hermione and Gwen were working on an idea of adding a second band. Talking about her project through letters, Beth had noted that it would be handy to coordinate on the ground, yes, but commanders would probably want to be able to get messages out to everyone no matter which channel they were tuned to — Hermione had gotten the idea of a channel for emergency announcements, which every device was always receiving but couldn't broadcast on, that ability restricted to devices held by officers. Thankfully, the enchantment necessary for that would be much simpler, and both could run in parallel, so it shouldn't be too difficult to add to the box. She had additional ideas for this second, receive-only band, maybe include a selection of channels with various announcements and programmes going — exactly like muggle radio, was the idea — but they would want the emergency band to always be going...and maybe include a relay switch, so emergency announcements from higher up the chain of command could be passed down quickly, they were working on it.
Payne would have told their guests that this was the first test of the devices's ability to broadcast internationally, but that was a lie — something Payne said people did all the time, just because it made the performance more impressive. They'd already tested it, confirmed it could reach their partner teams thousands of kilometres away, even all the way in America, with only minor interruption to the signal. Hermione would call that a success, it was already a success, the point of this presentation was just to make that clear to the people in charge.
Even if this magical radio was the only contribution Hermione ended up making, she'd still helped. That was worth something, she thought.
Though she could have done without the silly presentation and everything. She understood it was necessary, the whole complicated process that went into starting production, but she didn't think she was really needed here — they'd decided Payne and Elbert would be doing all the talking, she was just included because she'd been a major part of the project. (Though having to deal with this sort of thing wasn't really what Hermione would call a reward.) She'd rather be back in her office, honestly. It'd occurred to her that some kind of headset might be convenient, and while designing an enchantment that would reproduce the transmission for the user and pick up their speech was trivial, Lieke had immediately pointed out that the user would still have to fish the box out of their pack or whatever if they needed to switch channels. That was less than ideal, a solution for that problem hadn't immediately occurred to her. She was toying with an idea of a sort of bracelet, which would have a dial synced with the gears in the device, but getting that set of enchantments to work was complicated...
They might have put together a useable prototype, but that didn't mean they were done. Hermione still had work to do, she'd rather be poking away at that than stand here while everyone found their seats, waiting for the silly presentation to start...
Luckily, once everyone had sat down, the presentation itself went pretty quickly. Payne waltzed up to the front of the lecture space, clapping his hands to draw attention to himself. He kept his comments very brief, welcoming all their guests to the University, introducing himself, reminding them of the Commission's charge to develop new technologies to help deal with the current emergency. It was barely a minute before he handed it off to the team, waving forward Elbert, Payne moving to take one of the empty seats in the bottom row.
Elbert very briefly said hello, and went straight into explaining the complex puzzle they'd been working with. Magical defences being effective against the aliens' weaponry, and militaries around the world now working side-by-side with mages, but magic interfered with electromagnetic signals, badly disrupting the communication technology widely used in the muggle world. Not going into much detail, just skimming over the basic problem — everyone in the room should be familiar with the communications issues they'd been having lately, but probably didn't have the technical knowledge to understand the details (and didn't need to know that much anyway). He included the additional restrictions of wanting something portable, so individual soldiers could carry them on their person, preferably avoiding the need for electricity — not quite two months after the attack, they were already beginning to have serious difficulty keeping even essential services powered — which would ideally be scalable for mass production, the manufacturing process requiring as little magic as possible.
They'd been spinning their wheels trying to think of some kind of workaround to get radio signals through wards when their team's student member came up with the idea for an entirely novel device instead — Hermione perked up a little at her name, Elbert indicated her with a nod over his shoulder, she gave the crowd a little wave. He described communications mirrors, giving a very basic explanation of how they worked, Hermione's initial idea to exploit the same mechanism to make something far more versatile. Then he ran down a very brief summary of the history of the project, Elbert and Gwen refining the enchantments, Marcel coming up with a scheme for the reservoirs, Hermione working on the overall design and walking a group of non-magical engineering students through actually building thing. Yes, Elbert assured them, responding to the noises of disbelief in the small crowd, this device had been built entirely by muggle hands, it required no spellcasting whatsoever at any point in the process.
And that was a new development, only resolving in the last week or so. They'd thought a wand would be needed at least to set the unique image in the reservoirs, used to sync devices to each other, but Marcel had designed a workaround. Hermione was aware that physical alchemy could be used to produce gemstones — the stones used as reservoirs in enchanting were primarily manufactured — though she'd had very little knowledge of how it was done. The combination of filtering the raw materials and keeping impurities out of the workspace and building the crystalline structure was altogether far too complex to accomplish with a simple wanded charm — instead, alchemists designed rune circles that built the crystals automatically when exposed to the proper materials. The enchantments involved were extremely precise and complex, and it could often take hours for a single stone of usable size to form, but the process was very reliable and reproducible, there were standard schema for all manner of materials out there.
Their original concept had been designed using quartz for reservoirs, but after a bit of playing around Marcel had switched to chemically-perfect diamonds instead — apparently, pure carbon could be easily isolated from ash through related methods, and was easier to work with than the silicate that went into quartz. The total weight of the diamonds in that box worked out to a little over fifty carats, which was slightly absurd...but diamonds simply didn't have the same value on the magical side, being quite easy to manufacture with only a bit of (relatively advanced) enchanting and a handful of ash. Sometimes Hermione still showed her muggle-raised sensibilities. Honestly, it was nice to have muggles on the team and among the assistants sometimes, if only so she wasn't the only one dumbfounded when one of the mages did something like casually manufacture fifty carats of diamond in the space of an afternoon.
Getting their muggle assistants to successfully produce the diamonds was trivial, it was just enchanting. Quite complex enchanting, yes, but the chemistry and geometry that went into it was actually easier for their muggle peers to understand than the far more esoteric concepts that went into the rest of the device. Working out a scheme to project the image they wanted onto a reservoir, normally done with a charm, was an entirely new innovation, though it'd taken relatively little original thinking — Marcel adapted it directly from the same techniques alchemists used to create gemstones. Normally, the work area was ringed with runes that defined the chemical structure the alchemist wanted the circle to produce; Marcel had instead designed a scheme that defined the magical structure he wanted it to produce, a separate enchantment drawing the image into the reservoir.
And this trick even solved a second problem Marcel had been considering: two different mages casting the same image would produce slightly different results. There were a lot of complex reasons why, due to changing ambient magic conditions, the properties of the mages' wands, as well as the differing character of each mage's own magic. These imperfections could be reduced by various means, but never entirely eliminated. However, along with the plans they'd sent out, they'd included his schema to automatically produce these images, one for each channel they'd be using — and, due to the part of the enchantment that isolated the work space, all of the images would have come out perfectly identical, no matter where they were produced. Since it could be designed with any mathematical or arithmantic or graphic formula the user could think of, the technique had also greatly broadened the range of possible images, the number of channels they could use now effectively infinite. There were a number of potential issues that might have come up which were no longer a concern, and as a bonus the devices were now much simpler to programme as well, it was a neat trick.
It was a relatively small step from common alchemical practice, Hermione had been somewhat surprised that nobody had ever thought of doing that before — but then, they would never have needed to, since any alchemist doing this sort of work would obviously have a wand on hand. Using mathematical functions to programme reservoirs, which could then be further manipulated, was giving her ideas, but only in broad strokes thus far, she wasn't sure if that would go anywhere...
Elbert was just finishing the basics of how the device functioned, as well as a couple ideas they had for greater convenience on the user end. "But," he cut himself off with a clap of his hands, "that is all a matter for the future. For today, let's get on to the test, shall we? As you can see, there is a dial on the side of the box here, through which the user selects the channel they wish to use. May I have a volunteer?" There was a bit of muttering and a few glances, before someone sitting near the Dutch Prime Minster got to his feet — a young man, Hermione assumed he was some kind of assistant. "Yes, very good, come down here."
As the young man slipped between the rows and started up toward the desk, Elbert quick glanced at his watch — the other teams were giving similar presentations to similar authorities in their area, they'd coordinated the schedule ahead of time. (Which they'd done through the device, because this 'test' was just pointless showmanship.) Once the assistant had gotten close enough, Elbert said, "Very well, sir, just go ahead and put your hand on the box." Giving Elbert a bemused glance, the man did so — he immediately twitched, letting out a little surprised oh, yanking his hand away. "That was the display you just saw. Mind describing it for the class?"
A little sheepish about his reaction, the man touched the box again. "It looks like there's a flat screen, semi-transparent, floating a couple centimetres above the dial just here. There are words on it, in black, spelling Ahmeh... Ah, Ahmeba, Ahmedabad?" Hermione tried not to wince at the man very obviously struggling with the Hindi name.
"Yes, Ahmedabad — that would be the School of Building Science and Technology in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. India, that is." The region was broken up into multiple different nations on the magical side, some of the mages in the group sometimes had trouble keeping track of that sort of thing. "We'll be talking to them later. Go ahead and turn the dial just there until you see Moscow — that would be a similar project to ours hosted at Moscow State University on the other end." The point Elbert was making being that it was very easy to use, and didn't require a mage to do things like tune it.
The man thumbed the dial for a moment, then dug a nail into the surface to turn it. "There's a lot more resistance to it than tuning a radio, and it feels like it clicks into certain places."
"If you will recall from my explanation of the concept before," Elbert said to the audience, "the signal is carried through a sort of magical resonance, picked up by small diamonds inside the box. In order for the enchantment to properly interact with the diamonds, they must be precisely in line with... It is sort of like a circuit board, a surface which bears the enchantment, one section marked off for the diamond carrying the signal. The enchantment only works if one of these diamonds is in the correct position, so it has been designed to hold firmly in place, to prevent the mechanism from drifting out of alignment and losing the signal. Have you found Moscow for us?"
The man reached out to touch the box again, probably to double-check he'd tuned it correctly. "Yes, the display says Moscow."
"Perfect. That's all I needed you for, you can go ahead and sit down again." Detaching a gently curved length of plain metal from the box, Elbert said, "Another problem that occurred to us was how to focus the sound that would be picked up. Without any intervention, the enchantment we were working with would reproduce every sound in the environment, precisely how they would sound standing in the device's place. This presents an obvious problem, when you consider all the noise that might be in the environment. The problem only becomes more serious when you imagine attempting to use such a device to coordinate a battle — I understand those can get quite loud.
"The preliminary solution we devised is this little thing here," he said, holding up the plain, uninteresting-looking object. "There are a couple basic enchantments here, which act as a sort of filter — the device will only transmit the voice of the person holding this little piece of metal in my hand. Not only will it only transmit my voice, but it will only do so when I wish it to. There are various means by which to design an enchantment to respond to the user's intent — we considered simply designing the enchantments on the device to only pick up sound projected with this intent, but we were concerned more marginal cases may result in the device improperly failing to transmit the user's voice, but those cases can be avoided with the addition of physical contact. So, despite that I am holding the device now, I don't wish for our friends in Moscow to hear what I am saying, so they will not be getting a single word. Now, requiring the user to constantly carry around this little thing is a bit impractical, Miss Granger's group are working on a more permanent solution. Do you have a good idea of what that'll look like at this point?" he asked Hermione, turning to look over his shoulder.
Oh, well, put her on the spot, why not. Hermione took a step away from the blackboard, trying not to cringe as the eyes of the crowd full of a couple dozen very important people turned on her, firming herself with a deep breath. "We have already finished a tentative design for the equivalent of a headset, it just wasn't ready quite in time for this presentation. It looks like a curled tube of metal, about..." She held up a hand, fingers and thumb bending to make a shape sort of halfway between a C and a lower-case E. "It hooks over the top of the ear, just against the side of the head here, held in place with a basic sticking charm. It works as a pick-up, yes, but it will also reproduce the incoming audio as well, directly into the user's ear — it occurred to me it may be difficult to hear if the box is in a backpack or something. We're currently working on another device, perhaps a wristband, which can be used to change channels without needing to retrieve the box, but the enchanting on that one is more complicated, it may or may not be included in the first production model."
Elbert seemed faintly surprised — he might not have realised the headset was actually finished, they'd wrapped it up very recently — but he just nodded and moved on. As he started speaking again, Hermione ducked back closer to the blackboard again, standing with Gwen and Marcel, let out a little breath. "Very good, then. In that case, our little friend here will just be for our demonstration today. There may be situations in which multiple people will need to be heard through a single device, for whatever reason — for those cases, there will be a separate attachment, which may simply be set down in the middle of a conference table or what have you. Alternatively, the basic device without the inclusion of any of these focussing attachments may be used, but there may be issues with volume, and picking up unwanted noise, using some kind of focussing element is recommended. Any questions before I call our friends in Moscow?"
While Elbert dealt with a couple questions from their audience, occasionally checking his watch to make sure they weren't running late, Hermione considered that last problem. The focussing attachment Elbert was referring to didn't actually work by intent, as Hermione's earpiece did — in a long-distance conferencing situation, people who were in the same room speaking to each other wouldn't be picked up by an intent-based enchantment, potentially leaving people in other locations out of significant parts of the conversation. Instead it worked directly with sound, attempting to boost the clarity of voices and filter out everything else, which was difficult, but not unique. The equivalent to microphones for magical radio worked on similar principles, it was relatively simple to adapt them.
A problem they hadn't solved yet was designing a multi-purpose device — at the moment, they could build a box which used no attachments, or the one Elbert was holding now, or Hermione's earpiece, or the conferencing one. If a box was designed to work with one of them, it needed to use it at all times, and it couldn't use any of the others. Last she'd checked (talking to Gwen about the status of the project just last night), they were working on a solution to that, it was just somewhat complicated. They planned to pair these attachments with their device using a sort of serial number as a key rune; make an addition to the key rune for each attachment, and create a second dial much like the channel selection, to swap out the section with the key rune in the relevant enchantment.
The big problem came in when the user wished to skip using an attachment altogether. It was relatively simple to swap out a referent in an enchantment — Hermione suspected it might actually be a completely unique development in enchanting, but once the idea had occurred to them it wasn't difficult to work with — but a null referent would simply cause the enchantment to fail to work, meaning the device wouldn't produce or transmit sound at all. What they needed was basically a second switch to turn on and off the part of the enchantment that interacted with the attachment, but by that point the interface was starting to get too complicated. They had been playing with designing ways to place the attachment in the box such that it interrupted this part of the enchantment, only letting it function when the attachment was removed, but that presented problems when using multiple attachments, and what if they didn't want to use the critical attachment? would they have to remove both each time?
They didn't actually have a working prototype yet, but Gwen had come up with the idea for one they were still refining. The inspiration had actually come from working with the switches necessary to pass on emergency broadcasts — Gwen had designed a bridge between the main body of the enchantment and the relay, which would detect whether or not there was a meaningful referent in place. If the relay enchantment contained a null referent, the device would directly receive and produce sound; but if it contained a meaningful referent, the bridge would close, allowing the relay to function.
It was, essentially, a simple logic gate. Which was giving Hermione ideas, it was honestly hard to stay focussed on the presentation.
Eventually, Elbert called Moscow — the faintly-accented voice on the other end came through perfectly clearly, as though standing in the room here with them, without any of the distortion inherent to most muggle audio. There was a little hissing in the audience at the demonstration that the device worked, Elbert and his Russian counterpart were bantering a little. Hermione wasn't paying that much attention, thoughts constantly drawn to the half-formed idea trying to resolve itself at the back of her head.
Once they were done with Moscow, Elbert delayed for a couple minutes (with another glance at his watch), talking about the sort of thing that might interrupt the signal. There needed to be a contiguous flow of ambient magic between devices in order for them to talk to each other, so major disruptions in ambient magic could result in difficulties in transmission — for example, ambient magic over land and ambient magic in the ocean were discontinuous. (Hermione wasn't sure why that was, just one of those funny things.) The signal didn't need to pass in a straight line, but any funny bends it had to take would sometimes result in distortions in the audio.
Elbert called Juba next, in Sudan, which was currently host to a large international presence supporting the effort to dig the aliens out of the Congo. This person's voice didn't come through quite perfectly, with an odd... "Echo" wasn't the right word, exactly, it sounded like the timing was just slightly off, as though his voice was speeding up and slowing down just noticeably, at random. It was only a small disruption, lensing from looping around the Mediterranean and squeezing through the Levant and the Sinai, still perfectly understandable. Probably clearer than a radio transmission from the same distance, honestly.
There was a little bit of crackling, though — not constant, like static, just a brief burst now and then — Elbert explained what that was while stalling for a minute or two before calling India. Volcanic activity could also cause significant interruptions in ambient magic — in particular, the volcanoes in Greece and the fault lines in Anatolia and the Levant. One of the faults in Anatolia was particularly noisy, that's probably what the crackling was from. A reasonable guess, since they called Ahmedabad just after that, and this transmission also carried the same crackling — drawing a direct line between Groningen and Ahmedabad would go over the faults in Anatolia, but not the Dead Sea Fault, and would also mostly avoid the more active tectonic boundaries associated with India, so.
Hermione was only temporarily distracted, inexorably drawn back to the idea percolating in her head.
While Elbert called their associates in Shanghai — the signal coming through very clear this time, cutting across the plains of central Asia more or less uninterrupted — Hermione finally gave up, cast a quick privacy charm around herself, Gwen, and Marcel. "I think I'm having another big idea."
"Oh, no," Marcel drawled, "here we go again."
Gwen cut him a glance around Hermione. "Be nice, Marcel." Hermione was pretty sure that had been sarcastic, just teasing, but okay. "What are you thinking about this time?"
"Those switches you've been working on with Elbert, are they generalisable? I mean, the mechanics of the logic in isolation, without needing explicit referents."
For a couple seconds, Gwen just blinked at her, obviously confused. "Well, yes, I suppose. Or, I should say, the basic structure doesn't require specific referents to function — obviously it will need inputs and outputs to resolve properly."
"She got the idea from Babbling, the one you know." The Ancient Runes Professor at Hogwarts, Marcel meant. Hermione had had no idea she was actually somewhat well-known outside of Britain, for her work before she'd started teaching at Hogwarts — she was one of the big-name innovators in modular enchanting, a method of breaking enchantments down into pieces that could be swapped in and out at will to adjust the effects. Hermione had checked out one of her papers since joining the programme at Groningen, and Babbling had explicitly referenced modern muggle computers as an inspiration. The ultimate goal was to break enchantments down into such small pieces that you could create complex effects from basic elements and instructions, but it was still a very new field, there were few practical applications of the technique at this time. Other than making wards somewhat easier to set up, she guessed.
"Mm, Elbert and I never explicitly mentioned Babbling's work, but I'll admit it might have been an influence. Why?"
Hermione didn't immediately answer Gwen's question, instead turning to Marcel. "Your trick to put an image on a reservoir, can it be scaled down? To, say, something similar to a referent circle."
Marcel let out a puff of breath, his eyes tipping up to the ceiling for a second. "I don't see why not. The runes may have to be quite small, but it should be doable."
"The runes in the circle lay out the terms that define the structure of the image, right? Is there any reason that, instead of describing the image with runes, these terms couldn't instead themselves be images on reservoirs, which your enchantment manipulates in some way to create a composite image?"
"You would need to— No, you wouldn't need to isolate it, as long as the terms— Hmm..." Marcel frowned, thoughtfully glaring off at nothing — Hermione could practically feel the calculations going on in there, lips and fingers twitching now and then.
By this point, Elbert was finishing up talking to Shanghai, beginning his introduction to their final demonstration: Elbert would be calling the American general commanding the large international force marching south toward the Amazon. Their American associates had agreed that the most dramatic demonstration possible to cap it off was a good idea, just for the showmanship of it, so one of their people had apparated south in multiple hops, catching up with the army in the middle of the mountains of Columbia. They'd already talked to one of the general's staff earlier today — the signal was the messiest of all their tests, lensing somewhat getting through the Bering Strait and choppy from the Ring of Fire (especially crossing the volcano belt in Mexico), but it was still perfectly comprehensible. Which was a neat trick, Hermione hadn't realised they'd be able to get messages across the oceans at all, but going the long way around, the Bering Strait was narrow and shallow enough that the signal seemingly island-hopped across. They'd confirmed the signal would reach Japan, presumably jumping across at Sakhalin — or perhaps across the Korea Strait, but that seemed less likely — but they hadn't tested whether they could reach much of Indonesia, or the Philippines and Australia. Someone would get around to that at some point, not their job.
Finally, Marcel said, low and slow, "Yes. Yes, I do think that's possible. The enchanting and alchemy work would be somewhat tedious, but I can't think of any issues that would prevent such a device from functioning as intended. Though, I'm not certain what possible use it could have. It could be used to generate complex formants, or automatically perform certain esoteric calculations, I suppose..."
Oh, well... There was something to her random idea, then. That was interesting to know. "Calculations were sort of exactly what I was thinking, in a way."
"Excuse me?"
"I think it might — might — be possible to design a magical computer."
Gwen and Marcel looked more confused than anything, which was honestly kind of funny, Hermione felt her lips twitching. "You mean those funny boxes the muggles use to do maths?" Gwen asked, sounding very sceptical.
Hermione recalled Gwen mostly avoided having anything to do with the more finicky technologies, not entirely comfortable using them. Which was fair enough — mages had to be very careful to limit any outbursts of magic when in the vicinity of an (unshielded) computer, they could seriously damage the components without meaning to. "They're used for a lot more than just speeding up maths, but yes, those are what I'm talking about. Except, I think, if we can do it right, a magical version will be much more powerful? The images on reservoirs can be far more complex than digital memory, for one..."
"Depending on how small you plan on making them," Marcel said, "they won't be that complex. There's a limit to how much information you can pack into a reservoir, relative to its size and purity."
"Well, digital memory only has two states, so."
Marcel jerked backward, turning to give Hermione a baffled, wide-eyed look. "What? Really?"
"Yes? Didn't anyone explain to either of you how computers work?" By the blank looks and shrugs she got from Gwen and Marcel, she was going with no. "Right, well, I'm not an expert, but you have a basic instruction set which contains all the operations it can perform, and then machinery that actually does the calculations, and a few different kinds of media that store the data being worked with — the muggle version of reservoirs, if you like. A magical version would have to work on the same basic principles, but we'd have a lot more freedom with...every part of it, really. See, computers work entirely on electricity, and—
"It's sort of like electronic lights, you see," Hermione said, abruptly switching tack in mid-sentence. "There's a switch that turns them on and off, right? Well, you can think of it like, inside of a computer are thousands and thousands of switches, turning the power in little tiny bits of it on and off. And there are things called logic gates, like the switches you're working on," gesturing to Gwen, "that detect the state of one of these power switches, or, more specifically compare a switch against the switch next to it, to see if they're both on or both off or one of each, and give some kind of output depending on their current state. And, the instruction set is designed to translate maths and images and the like, that might make sense to us, into a form that can use these logic gates, manipulating the on and off switches to produce the effect that the user wants. It's all very complicated, and I'm not an expert, but that's the basic idea. Am I making any sense?"
"I suppose," Gwen said, uncertain. "The structure sounds similar to a ward, in a way. Very different in the specifics, obviously."
Marcel seemed more vaguely interested than confused. "I'm curious how they manage to fit so much machinery in such a small space — you said there are thousands of these switches? And they really only have two states? How does that work? I can't imagine how you could do much of anything given only two states to represent data with."
"It's binary code — numbers are expressed in powers of two instead of powers of ten. All kinds of different operations, and shapes or colours or whatever else, are assigned a number, and— You know, that's not actually important, we wouldn't be using binary anyway. Reservoirs have much greater variety of possible states than digital data."
"Yes, even the smallest alchemical crystal arithmantically possible could hold a minimum of...fifty-nine distinct states? I would need to double-check the literature, but I think that's correct. And the smallest possible crystal would be prohibitively difficult to work with."
Depending on how this went, they might progress to miniaturising this stuff pretty damn far, but probably not that far — if Hermione remembered what he was referring to correctly, the theoretical smallest possible crystal was literally eight atoms of carbon. "Exactly. My thought was that we might — might — be able to copy the basic structure using magical principles. Which, computers have all kinds of uses, but, like radios, they require electricity and rare minerals — supply lines being thrown into disarray will make both of those increasingly hard to come by. And, if we're very lucky, our computers should be...much more efficient? In the actual process of the calculations being done, at least. You see, we can skip the whole process of translating whatever operation is being done into binary and then translating it back — I doubt a magical computer will be able to do nearly as many operations a second, but it will need to do far fewer operations. I think the biggest issue would be figuring out how to make it universal, freely programmable, and automatic."
Hermione suspected making a reproduction of early computers — where the instruction set and the initial data essentially had to be input by hand, bit by bit — would be extremely simple, with a little bit of refining on the basic components Elbert and Gwen and Marcel were working on. Making an equivalent of a modern computer, on the other hand, where much of that could be done automatically by simply loading a programme from memory, would be much more complicated. Which was only fair, she guessed — on the muggle side, clearing that hurdle had taken decades. Hopefully they could improve that precedent somewhat...
"I'm still not sure I understand," Gwen said. "I'll take your word for it that we could work up a magical equivalent, but I didn't see what the point would be. Especially when there are other more pressing projects we could be working on."
"I'll admit, it might not have much in the way of short-term applications. But in the long term, we're talking about fundamentally changing almost everything about the modern world forever." Especially since their devices would be cheaper and easier to produce than digital computers, and they could exploit the work they've already done on communications to make the jump to a worldwide network very quickly. The implications for communications and sharing research and the like alone would be huge. But this was too big of an idea to explain in the space of a couple minutes, such a complicated development too difficult to predict, doubly so when talking to people who only had the loosest familiarity with the Digital Revolution in the first place. "Trust me, Gwen, if this works, it'll be a big deal — as in, it will cause such a major shift in science and industry and the economy and society in general that the project will be in history books. And I'm not joking, I mean that literally."
That was an intimidating thought, if Hermione was being honest. That future students studying the history of technology might one day read about the ideas Hermione was having right now, at the age of sixteen, was...odd. Just, deeply surreal — she was trying to keep herself focussed on the specifics of the project, and not anything absurd like whether Hermione Granger might one day end up listed shortly after Alan Turing, because that was just too much.
While Gwen and Marcel were still digesting that idea, Elbert finished his part of the presentation, Payne again taking the floor to take some final questions, talk about what would be required to mass-produce their radios, and whatever other issues might come up, Hermione didn't know, honestly. Marcel didn't waste any time at all catching him up on what they'd been talking about — somewhat to Hermione's surprise, Elbert grasped the significance of the idea almost immediately, suggested they bring it to Payne as soon as the presentation was over.
It took Payne maybe two minutes of discussion, once they finally got around to it, to suggest they pass off the radio project to new people as soon as possible, and immediately start on this one instead. He would make sure they got whatever people and resources they needed, they could pull anyone in the team they thought would help, without sabotaging any other critical effort they were working on. Gwen and Marcel seemed rather taken aback by how seriously Payne was taking this, but Hermione wasn't, really — as she'd tried to tell them a few minutes ago, cheap, simple to manufacture magical computers would be a significant, world-changing development. Payne's response was a perfectly reasonable one.
Leaving the lecture hall, Hermione couldn't help the feeling that she'd just stumbled across a project that would come to dominate the rest of her life, completely by accident. She didn't know how she felt about that, but it probably wasn't a bad thing — there were definitely worse things she could be doing with herself.