22nd February 1996 (63:10:03)
— Contact plus 00.05.20:03.15
Judging simply by the sheer number of researchers and technicians involved, it was undoubtedly the single largest scientific effort ever undertaken in the history of humanity. The teams initially given samples of the peculiar beetles, assigned to determine their function, had very quickly realised the scale of the threat — they'd begun raising the alarm several days before the atmospheric changes had begun to become apparent on the ground. The Commission had reacted immediately, issuing a directive that literally every single specialist in relevant fields be pulled to work on a solution, they'd even gotten permission to commandeer outside resources and equipment and experts as necessary, scrambling to throw absolutely everything they had at the problem.
Which, as panicky as it might have seemed from the outside at first, Hermione was convinced that was a perfectly reasonable reaction: these beetles were an existential threat, they would kill literally everyone on earth if they weren't stopped. But, as the effects intensified and spread, creating toxic clouds that grew and grew by the day, everything living within them suffocated or dissolved by volatile acids, the scepticism Hermione had overheard in that first week or so had quickly tapered off. The projections Hermione had seen predicted the effects would cover the entire planet by July, ultimately resulting in the complete extinction of the human species when food stored in shelters finally ran out, certainly no later than a year from now.
That was a terrifying thought, of course, but Hermione was confident it wouldn't actually happen — when absolutely every available resource the world over was thrown into a single project, things could happen very quickly.
Hermione wasn't actually on the project — Payne had kept her team working on her computer idea, though Elbert and Marcel were occasionally pulled away for a consult — but she was keeping herself informed, skimming over the deluge of reports broadcast out by one team or another in one country or another, hundreds of pages of data coming out every day. Given this was an evolving situation and they weren't bothering to take the time to slow down and resolve the progress they were making into a proper summary, there was kind of a lot to get through to get any idea of how things were going — but the teams involved were aware a lot was happening, so they made sure to flag the important bits in as attention-getting of a way as they could, Hermione only occasionally checking back over the rest of it for context.
It hadn't taken very long for researchers to conclude that these things were definitely magic. That wasn't exactly a new conclusion, there'd been a debate ongoing for some time among people investigating the aliens' equipment over exactly how much of it was mundane and how much was magical. For some time now, most of the aliens' living technology had been officially classified as magical creatures — some of their properties were the result of mundane biology and chemistry, but some of it was definitely magical.
The magical nature of their propulsion and shielding had been the first example to be definitively proven. They'd suspected as much from the beginning — they appeared to manipulate gravitational forces somehow, even generating controlled singularities from nothing, which mundane physics would suggest was absolutely impossible...and even if it were possible, the energy such a process would require would be incredible. However, it hadn't taken long for mages to note that the devices caused peculiar reverberations through ambient magic, careful analysis showing unfocussed bursts of magical energy in the instant before a singularity resolved. That had seemed proof enough, but then someone had managed to capture one of the source creatures alive. Supposedly, the things gave off a steady pulse of magical radiation — an analogous concept to black-body radiation, waste energy generated by the bioalchemical operation of all living things, sometimes colloquially referred to as an aura — so intense that even the muggles in the room could feel it on the air. They hadn't been able to keep the creature alive for very long, without the support structure of the ship it'd been attached to it'd quickly shrivelled and died, but it'd lived long enough to prove to everyone's satisfaction that the aliens' technology did involve magic somehow.
Which was quite fascinating, honestly, and Hermione clearly wasn't the only one who thought so: that discovery had led to a number of other avenues of investigation, only halted once the terraforming beetle problem had presented itself. The initial impression from a lot of mages was that the aliens somehow seemed even less magical than earth-native life — they were highly resistant to many spell effects, even entirely immune to most magics directly targeting the mind or soul. In fact, the taller aliens — there was a technical term in the literature, but most people just used the military slang "scabs" — didn't even register to spells designed to detect the presence of a soul. (Often referred to as human-presence detecting magics, which was annoyingly incorrect — they detected any sapient being, not just humans.) The magical structure referred to by magical scholars as the "soul" was a necessary product of consciousness, even detectable in the more intelligent animals, various mammals and birds, that the "scabs" didn't seem to have one suggested they were life more on the order of fish, or plants. Alive, yes, they did have a detectable aura, but certainly not self-aware.
That was, obviously, false. Whatever one might think of the aliens' moral character, the horrifying glimpses they'd gotten of their culture, they were certainly beings. Yet they were completely invisible to magics meant to interact with a mind, an unreadable blankness to mind mages and omniglots — but that wasn't true of all the aliens, the xenosauria ("dinos") were detectable, and so were various other of their creatures. They really had no explanation for that at the moment. The only reasonable theory they had was that the minds of the "scabs", for whatever reason, operated through a spectral resonance that was incompatible with familiar magics. The metaphor wasn't perfect, but as though mind magics broadcast on a frequency that their minds simply didn't receive, somehow.
It was the only good theory they had, though they hadn't actually managed to find the right 'frequency' — but in looking for it they'd found what they were pretty sure were the peculiar magical–gravitational pulses the aliens used for communications. Last Hermione had checked, they'd been working on a device to jam the aliens' transmissions, but that project too had been put on hold as the terraforming beetles became a more pressing concern.
It'd only taken a brief examination for researchers to decide that the beetles made absolutely no chemical sense. They did pull materials in from the environment, their bodies performing chemical reactions that released carbon oxides, sulphur oxides, and hydrogen sulphide, plus the occasional other trace chemicals, all the while releasing countless little spores that grew into more beetles. However, it didn't seem like the chemical reaction balanced — not only did the researchers have absolutely no idea how the beetles were causing the reaction in the first place, but the inputs and the outputs of the reactions didn't seem to match up as they should. In particular, sulphur atoms seemed to just appear out of nowhere, the conservation of mass and energy both being broken at some point in the process.
Bioalchemists in various teams (at more or less the same time) came to the conclusion that that was exactly what was happening: the beetles were creating sulphur atoms, out of nothing. The beetles were performing molecular alchemy — altering atoms from one element to another, or else creating them a priori, and arranging them into the chemical the user desires. Molecular alchemy was still a mostly theoretical field, thus far there'd only been a few small-scale successes, done primarily to prove that it was possible, if not practical with the methods available to alchemists at present. All their alchemists had ever managed to do was make tiny demonstrations, only generating a few hundred molecules at maximum, the current research in the field focussed on ways to generalise the process to increase potential yields to something that was actually useable.
The aliens, clearly, had very different methods available to them.
From what Hermione had read, the people on the project really had no idea how the beetles worked — their understanding of alchemy required a conscious mind to visualise the process, which the beetles certainly didn't have. Dozens of meetings, in-person and over the new radios, had proceeded over the course of a couple days, and they'd decided on a...rather unorthodox strategy. The beetles simply spread too quickly for them to do anything about, and reversing the damage they'd done would be a huge project. And they couldn't design a device which could solve either problem at scale, since it would require fundamentally revolutionising their understanding of an entire field of magic. They simply didn't have the time.
So, instead, they'd decided to reverse-engineer the beetles: they'd produce one strain to hunt down the aliens' beetles, and a second to reverse the damage to the environment.
Hermione had initially worried that they'd only be creating a new problem they'd have to solve — or, more terrifyingly, accidentally create a runaway Von Neumann machine that would destroy the world regardless — but there was actually a built-in solution to that problem. In their dissections of the beetles, they'd discovered an organ that was seemingly designed to resonate with the magical–gravitational signals the aliens used for communications — the theory was that the aliens could switch them off once they weren't needed any longer, or perhaps even send them instruction sets to change the function they were performing on the fly. That organ could theoretically be reshaped to respond to purely magical signals, giving them fine control over the beetles. At the very least, they were sure they could turn them off, but it was possible they'd be able to do even more with them, they were in preliminary studies into the concept already.
Honestly, some of the research Hermione had looked over was fascinating. Some of the experts on the project thought it was possible that, should the effort to reverse-engineer the beetles succeed — of which they had pretty strong confidence, due to the versatility of modern blood alchemy techniques — they might be able to use them for all manner of things. She'd read theoretical outlines of programmes to automate the desalination and purification of water, to filter pollutants from the air, to desalinate and strip toxins out of soil, or instead seed nitrates and phosphates, acting as a self-propagating fertiliser, keeping farmland fertile indefinitely.
One preliminary proposal Hermione had stumbled across from a certain muggleborn Chinese alchemist suggested it should be possible to reverse desertification. It would have to be done in multiple steps, different strains of the beetles making successive alterations, but his work-up seemed...theoretically sound, so far as Hermione could tell. She'd flagged his name on her account to make sure she'd see anything else he put out, and he'd come up with the idea long enough ago that he'd since sent out a second version of it with a few refinements, along with answers to the various questions and suggestions he'd gotten from colleagues, and apparently even the Chinese government, curious how practical of a containment it might be for the inexorable advance of the Gobi Desert in particular.
This alchemist claimed that, assuming the bioalchemists could succeed in their efforts, there was theoretically no reason that they couldn't turn the entirety of the Gobi into fertile land, if they wanted to. Which was just absurd, the scale of the project he was talking about... But Hermione didn't see where he was wrong, assuming there weren't any errors in his chemistry she was missing...
Hermione had come to realise early on — during that first week, the concerted attacks on major cities still ongoing, Beth out fighting while Hermione hunkered down at Rock-on-Clyde with the Weasleys and countless strangers Beth had had evacuated there — that the world she'd known had already been gone, that everything would be different, forever. While the Statute of Secrecy being summarily abolished was undoubtedly a good thing, in her opinion, there was precious little cause to be optimistic. Millions of people were going to die, had already died. With the violence and chaos, the abrupt collapse in the world economy, with the peculiar terraforming beetles poisoning the air, they'd be lucky if the final death toll didn't end up being in the billions. For months now, the future had seemed terribly grim — if her project here weren't so deeply fascinating, she honestly wasn't sure she'd be able to work up the enthusiasm to even keep getting out of bed in the morning (or whatever time she happened to be waking up that day), her horror at the present state of everything looming over her black and heavy, all but driving every thought out of her head if she slowed down even for a minute.
But, sometimes, reading a proposal to make the most inhospitable of deserts bloom, she had to wonder. Slowly — so slowly, a distant image coalescing bit by bit as the days passed — Hermione was starting to see a future worth building on the other side.
On those days, the horror didn't feel quite so heavy.
But stopping the extinction-level threat they currently faced — and perhaps one day taking the same technology that had nearly killed them all to reshape the world for the better — that was not Hermione's job. Today, she and the team had a presentation to make to Payne. As preoccupied as Payne had been helping to ramp up implementation of the various technologies and techniques coming out of their teams here in Groningen, he'd had little enough time to stick his nose into their computer project — they had sent him occasional progress updates, more often then not offered to justify requests for supplies or equipment and additional staff, but it'd been months since they'd had a proper meeting with him about it.
Hermione had expected them to get around to it a lot sooner than this, honestly. As soon as they had the first working model of the technology, perhaps, just as proof that it worked, before moving on to more practical applications. But Gwen had stumbled across an idea, which had sparked a brainstorming session, and Elbert wanted to see if they could take that extra step before bringing it all to Payne. Because he could be a bit of a showman like that, sometimes.
The room was completely unrecognisable as the space set aside for them to build in. It had been a somewhat oversized classroom, centred around a ring of tables set up in the middle, chairs lined along the outside — the Commission had gradually taken over portions of humanities departments as well, by the books on the shelves and posters on the walls this used to be a philosophy classroom. They'd used the tables at first, schematics and enchantment schema and alchemical arithmancy spread out across oversized sheets of paper covering the whole ring, but before too long they'd packed it all up and started figuring out how to actually build the thing.
All the furniture in the room had been removed, along with the posters and books and whatever else, sent away to storage. (Who knew for how long that would be, if the University would ever resume normal operation.) They'd commandeered a large collection of bookshelves from here and there across the University, and Hermione, Gwen, and a team of muggles — the same people who'd helped with the radio project, becoming quite competent enchanters at this point — got to work laying down the enchantments and wards that functioned as the infrastructure of the device, while Marcel and his people worked at manufacturing the ceramics and reservoirs they would need. It turned out silver wasn't available at the moment, not in the volume they wanted, so they adjusted the design to work with bronze instead — a special magical alloy, Marcel had to mix it himself. The first round of materials went into the control box, put together by Elbert and his team, and then the alchemy team started producing reservoir cells, Hermione's team layering them with the proper enchantments, when each was finished slotted into its designated spot on the shelves...
They'd taken several diversions through the process of actually building the thing, when one person or another had an idea, or they realised in the implementation that one element or another wouldn't work out quite as they'd expected. Hermione had accidentally made a lot more work for them, putting one of the cells onto a shelf, the runes carved into the wood and the ceramic of the cells dancing in her eyes — and she abruptly realised that the sorting enchantments could be significantly streamlined simply by filtering out one class of formants early, its absence further down the line allowing those functions to be greatly simplified. Once she'd pointed it out Gwen and Gijs had practically been slapping themselves, because that should have been obvious, and now they had to redo nearly half of the enchanting work. The final product would be much more efficient — in the end they'd been able to increase the total volume of their reservoir banks by nearly a third (which meant they'd also needed more reservoir cells, adding to the alchemy work as well) — and Marcel suspected it should also have reduced hang time, and would make the process of miniaturisation in future much easier, but still, she felt like such an idiot for not seeing it sooner...
The project had been a bit of a mess start to finish, was the point — they'd been making alterations to the design far later than was really practical, needing to go back and make changes to elements they'd already built to integrate new ideas. Some ideas had been too fundamental or too late in the process to be used, they had a sizeable sketchbook filled with notes for subsequent versions. But they had finished it, and it worked as expected, so it was finally time for them to show it off.
Or, for the others to show it off, anyway, Hermione just found these meetings tedious.
Payne waltzed into the room only slightly later than their meeting was scheduled for (busy man these days), tailed by an assistant of some kind — she noticed the assistant was wearing one of the earpieces Hermione had designed, one of their radios must be in his shoulder bag somewhere. He let out a low whistle as he stepped inside, eyes wandering over the nearby shelves. "Looks like you guys have been busy."
She guessed they had been that. When they'd started, it'd just been a normal-looking classroom, dominated by a circle of tables, but now it was packed full of tall bookshelves, dozens and dozens of them leaving only narrow walkways between the rows. Payne followed the row to the middle, stepping into a more open area around the control box, where Hermione and the rest of the team leads were waiting. A square a few metres wide had been left open at the centre of the room, in the middle of the square a sizeable cube of ceramic and wood, a few places tarps pinned across gaps to shield the internal mechanisms. (There was no design reason they needed the ceramic on the entire external surface of the cube, so they'd taken shortcuts, directed resources elsewhere.) It sort of looked like one of those photographs of early computers she'd seen, but made out of less modern materials. Which was only appropriate, she guessed, since they'd started with the already existent technology as a jumping-off point.
Elbert immediately got Payne's attention, quickly transitioning into the rather slapdash presentation they had planned — not like there was really a script or anything, just a list of points they had to go down. He reminded Payne about the initial spark of an idea from Hermione, he and Gijs — a muggle engineer, some kind of computer specialist, she wasn't certain of his exact qualifications — trading back and forth going over early design concepts. Hermione had noticed it'd be pretty simple to put together the enchantments they'd designed in the radio project to make logic gates, which could then be iterated upon to make an equivalent of modern computers using only enchanting; but Gijs, after some discussion with Gwen and Marcel, had quickly realised that there was absolutely no reason to do that whatsoever. Reservoirs could hold far more complex data sets than simple binary code, and enchanting scripts allowed them freedom to design instructions without needing to reduce them to binary logic operations, so the entire process could be vastly streamlined.
Oddly enough, the computer specialist had been the one in the room to realise that they could simply throw out familiar techniques of computer programming. Gijs and his team had been very enthusiastic about the prospect, which had taken Hermione by surprise, but probably shouldn't have — it wasn't very often that you got the opportunity to rebuild your entire field of expertise from first principles, operating with very different constraints. The programming team had had all kinds of questions for Hermione she hadn't been able to answer, honestly, running away with the idea faster than she could keep up...
Hermione understood the physical architecture and the enchanting decently well, but the alchemy involved and the particulars of how the programming worked were a bit over her head. Which was fair enough, alchemy was mostly a new subject to her, she'd catch up eventually.
Anyway, the bookshelves were primarily for data storage, similar to various classes of memory in an electronic computer — some of them were already loaded with some basic assets the device would need to function, but the free space could be used to store new information, both analogous to the function of secondary storage, or to temporarily hold data for ongoing operations, analogous to the function of RAM. Given the different technical limitations involved, the distinct media in electronic computers were essentially the same thing here. Each of those ceramic blocks was a device they called a reservoir cell, which Hermione's team were in charge of (with help from Gwen and Marcel's teams), why don't you go ahead and show Payne one of those?
Hermione had been sitting on the edge of the control box, she hopped back down to the floor to walk over to a nearby shelf, pulled a cell off at random. It was a plain ceramic box, the outside surface sketched with strings of runes. The runes defined enchantments to pass along data one way or the other, with identifying key runes to ensure the proper data was being written or accessed. The enchantments here defined various sectors, on the inside of the cell — Hermione unlatched the lid and pulled it open, displaying the internal mechanism. The space was filled with sheets of alchemised diamonds, stitched together with steel wire (also alchemised), sheets of (alchemised) bronze segregating each sector of reservoirs from each other. Anyway, the runes on the outside and inside surfaces specified which sector to be read from or written to, with an additional identifier for the reservoir; close up, tiny runes were barely visible on the wires, which further directed information to the proper reservoir. Each sector contained 128 reservoirs, arranged in sheets of eight reservoirs by sixteen, and each cell contained eight sectors, for a total of 1024 reservoirs.
Hermione closed the cell back up and slid it into its place on the shelf — there was a basic sticking enchantment that held each cell into its spot on the shelf, to make sure the enchantments didn't become misaligned. Anyway, Gwen's team (with assistance from Hermione's) had handled the shelves. Every surface of the shelves was covered with runes, the etchings filled with special alchemised ceramic to ensure they could hold up to the wear of their operation. (Wood had a relatively low energy tolerance, for most purposes.) Like the cells, the shelves had enchantments to direct queries to the correct cell (whereupon the cell took over), but they were also enchanted with a set of basic instructions — when triggered by the control box, the shelves could autonomously perform a variety of simple functions, which could help to distribute processing operations, greatly accelerating complex computations when properly utilised. (Which was a complicated programming problem, but they were getting better at it.) The bookshelves they'd been sent had been of irregular sizes, to streamline the process they'd taken them apart and cheated with magic to reshape the material into shelves of consistent sizes. Each shelf (about five and a half feet of useable space) contained ten cells, and each bank — what they called a set of shelves, floor to ceiling — contained six shelves.
So, expand that the other way and each bank contained six shelves, sixty cells, and 480 sectors, for a total of 61,440 individual reservoirs. And they'd managed to fit a hundred even banks in here, so go ahead and add a couple zeros to all those numbers to get the total.
Payne was a little dumbfounded by the numbers they were throwing around — were they saying there were six point one-four million diamonds in this room?! Yep, that's what the maths came out to, sure did. (Though that was just in the reservoir banks, that number didn't include the control box itself, or the programme cards.) They'd had a team of people (led by Marcel) constantly running the alchemy — all day, for weeks — and another team (led by Hermione) assembling all the sheets and putting them into the reservoir cells. Payne had given them permission to recruit people here with the Commission who didn't have anything better to do, and even idle residents of the city looking for some way to help out, their teams had expanded to surprising size over the last couple months. Hermione's team alone, building and enchanting the cells, had ballooned up to around eighty people — traditional enchanting projects assumed a single master enchanter and maybe a couple assistants, larger teams allowed them to blast through projects at speeds that were frankly absurd by magical standards. They were hoping to streamline manufacture in future, cut down the amount of actual effort necessary at various points, but yeah, there were a lot of labour hours in this thing, it was honestly slightly daunting to think about.
Once Payne was done being flabbergasted about the time put into this — not to mention the materials, over six million diamonds would have been worth a sizeable fortune before the economy collapsed, no matter that they were artificial and suspiciously perfect — he asked what the storage capacity worked out to, exactly. So Gijs had to explain that they didn't actually have a number for that. Reservoirs function fundamentally differently from digital media — a reservoir could hold a single, discrete piece of information, the possible complexity of the impression proportional to the size of the reservoir. They had 6,144,000 reservoirs in this room, but that was not equivalent to 6,144,000 bits (about 750 kilobytes). Bits only had two possible states (on or off), but the smallest possible theoretical reservoir had fifty-nine possible states. Assume fifty-nine possible states, and the conversion works out to a little over fifty megabytes — actually a little larger than hard drive in the dated personal computer in Hermione's office, but still very small by database standards.
But they weren't using the smallest arithmantically-possible reservoir — that referred to a crystal of only eight carbon atoms, which obviously wasn't feasible to work with. Their reservoirs, small though they were, allowed images that were more complex by several orders of magnitude. It was difficult to calculate exactly (mages didn't describe things in the same way), but presumably many thousands of possible unique states, at least. The theoretical conversion of this computer's storage capacity into familiar binary data could easily be well into the terabytes.
Though, that kind of direct conversation didn't work, necessarily. Each reservoir could hold a single, discrete piece of information. That information could be as simple as a single digit, or as complex as a differential equation; as simple as a single colour, or as complex as a full photograph. The storage capacities of the different kinds of media couldn't be directly translated, because they encoded and manipulated data in very very different ways. The advantage was most often toward the reservoirs, though it was impossible to say by what proportion — give them a specific set of data, and they could give an estimate of how many reservoirs it'd need to be broken up into, and from there an estimate of the ratio of bits to reservoirs necessary, but those proportions were going to be far too context-dependent to generalise.
The technical term in enchanting for the information stored in a reservoir was impression, or image. Their teams had quickly taken to calling them blinks (in reference to some analogy Hermione hadn't been in the room for), and the coincidence of there being 1024 reservoirs in a cell had lent to calling them kiloblinks; but that term was somewhat awkward to pronounce, before long a French member of the programming team had started saying "kilocils" instead (presumably translating "blink" to ciller, and then shortening to cil, meaning literally "eyelash"), which had gradually ended up becoming the preferred term. "Cil" and "cell" were rather similar sounding, but "kilocil" was only used when referring to software and "cell" when referring to hardware — the usage didn't overlap, so they'd never had a reason to change the terms they'd settled on. Might be worth doing in future, when they started making up 'official' documentation, but regardless.
The point was, don't think in bits and bytes, think in images and kilocils, they weren't directly translatable.
And, of course, there was the control block in the middle of the room. This was essentially the equivalent of a CPU — some of the processing duties were distributed to the shelves when feasible, but most of the actual operation of the device was done here. There were also reservoir banks in here — analogous to processor registers and CPU caches — information going through several layers of enchanting to perform various instructions. The physical architecture was extremely complicated, and built in three dimensions, so they couldn't take it apart and show it to Payne without seriously breaking something. But hey, how about instead they show him the schematics?
They'd pre-loaded that programme, so all Payne had to do was flip a switch to turn on the projector, and a three-dimensional illusion of the control box's architecture appeared floating in the air over it. It wasn't a direct representation of the physical structure, more of a design schematic, but the elements were oriented more or less how they were inside the box, different blocks labelled with their function stitched together with a complex spiderweb of lines indicating what was connected to what, each labelled with the particular class of enchantments along that path. The different parts were colour-coded, yellow and blue and red and green, the image a tangled mess. Hermione was familiar enough with the technology and the terminology they'd worked up that she could pick out what things were at a glance, but she was sure it was complete nonsense to Payne and his assistant.
Elbert waited a moment before continuing with his explanation — Hermione had to admit that Payne's wide-eyed expression, gaping dumbfounded at the illusion, was very funny, almost made sitting through this silly thing worth it. Once it seemed the shock had worn off somewhat, Elbert started pointing at different elements in the schematic, explained the very basics of what they did and how they'd built them, in the very general broad strokes. (Payne neither needed to know nor would understand the details.) Elbert rotated the illusion with a wave of his hand, reached up to poke at an interpreter block — the programme highlighted it with a white glow — he pushed a button on the panel. The illusion winked out for a fraction of a second, quickly replaced with a schematic of the interpreter block, pointing out the reservoir bank and the bridges, how information was pulled out of reservoirs and directed to different paths out, undergoing various functions dependent on what instruction was loaded into this pin right here. That was set by the control unit — borrowing the computing term, though the concepts weren't perfectly equivalent — Elbert tapped the bridge leading off and pushed a button again to load that schematic, giving a basic explanation of how the different functions of a programme were split up into instructions that could be—
"Wait, wait, hold on," Payne said, sounding a little overwhelmed. "Not only did you invent a goddamn magic computer, but you just casually invented interactive holograms while you were at it?!"
The mages kind of tittered over that, shooting each other smirks, so Hermione decided to actually answer the question for him. "It's just an illusion — mages have been practising illusion for millennia. The enchanting necessary to alter an illusion in response to the user's intent is somewhat more modern, but it's still been around for hundreds of years." Though they weren't seen very often, since there were very few practical uses for them — Hermione hadn't actually seen any interactive illusions in person before starting with the Commission, but supposedly they were very common in medical imaging. They hadn't invented them, was the point, just adapted them for purpose.
"Jesus Christ, magic keeps sneaking up on me, I guess. The things you lot can do..."
That seemed like a great cue to show off the things you lot can do. Elbert closed down this programme and flipped through a couple menus, loaded up the fluid dynamics simulator one of their programming people had worked up. There was a flash of multicoloured light from a few of the shelves, making Payne and his assistant twitch with surprise — was it supposed to do that? Yeah, that was waste energy: electronics released waste energy in the form of heat, and enchantments released waste as light. (Technically, free magical radiation that generated friction against the ambient environment, which itself took the form of light, but the distinction wasn't particularly relevant.) The enchantments in the control box gave off light whenever it did anything, but they were all shielded from view, while the shelves weren't. Anyway, a bit more poking at menus and pushing buttons, and the frame of a military plane of some kind appeared above the control box (Hermione wasn't an expert), and a blink later the space around it was shaded according to relative air speed, the turbulence generated modelled in colourful little swirls falling back in a wake behind the plane — it was even animated, eddies pulsing off the frame and stretching back in constantly regenerated chaotic spirals. Elbert explained how the diagramme worked, then added a vector for background windspeed — demonstrating how the simulation adjusted in a blink, the complex calculations performed almost instantly — and then swapped this plane in for one of the aliens' fighter craft, travelling at a much higher speed, meaning pretty much everything would have to be recalculated, and even working in the complex effects of travelling at hypersonic speeds, but the programme handled that adjustment just as quickly, fiendishly complex calculations performed en masse in an instant with another colourful flash from the bookshelves.
While Elbert played around with that, Gijs tried to explain why the calculations could be done so quickly compared to the equivalent models done on digital computers. Payne didn't really seem to follow it, the technical details over his head — they were also over Hermione's head, to be fair. As she understood it, enchantments performed operations more slowly — semiconductors could take a charge literally thousands of times more quickly than a reservoir could take an image — but the different data structure used by reservoirs meant the number of operations necessary could be drastically reduced. Once it was formatted correctly, all the data going into the simulation could be encoded into only a few reservoirs; and instead of the numerous granular calculations a digital computer would need to do for each point on the graph, the proper functions could be applied to the entire data set simultaneously with a single transformation; the result could then be used as a base to generate the next frame without any fuss, spitting out a new iteration...maybe five times a second? Hermione wasn't positive, it depended on how many steps the transformation actually took to execute, she wasn't as thoroughly informed on that part of the process. It took a couple transformations to format the output in a form the illusion could display, but the control box could perform multiple functions at once, so the simulation could continue ticking away while that was being done. And, they didn't actually have to generate every frame — there was no refresh rate, like in electronic monitors, the illusion a smooth, continuous image, the enchantments that controlled it automatically animating between the ticks generated by the simulation. Like a magical photograph, sort of, it was complicated.
The most difficult part, from what Hermione had heard, was figuring out how to programme things in a way that took advantage of the architecture of the device and the particular properties of using reservoirs to store data. Gijs's team was more familiar with digital data, obviously, so they were kind of just making it up as they went. They'd started out basically translating the programming structures they were familiar with into forms that could be stored on reservoirs, before realising, obviously, those techniques were based on entirely different underlying architecture, with different physical limitations. They were still figuring out how they could best use the special properties of enchantment-mediated computation, it was a work in progress, but the applications for modelling chaotic effects like turbulence had been immediately obvious once they started thinking outside the box.
Speaking of chaotic effects, Gijs said, smirking, show them the Mandelbrot plot. Sure, why not, as long as we're showing off — Elbert switched over to another programme with some button pushes and poking at illusory menus, another flash of light from one of the bookshelves as the new programme was loaded. This was something a couple of Gijs's people worked up for fun. Have you seen those animations zooming in on a fractal? The Mandelbrot set was one of those ones they did that with. The precise mathematics involved weren't important to explain, but. Normally, it was plotted in two dimensions, but it could be expanded into quaternion numbers and plotted in four dimensions; a three-dimensional slice could be taken out of that, and then you could do the same zooming in trick to see all the pretty geometry and spirals and stuff.
Hermione had seen an animation zooming in on a plot of the Mandelbrot set before, she forgot where exactly, and it was very pretty, all the colours and the iterating geometric patterns, almost psychedelic. It was even more impressive in three dimensions, if only due to the absurd number of calculations that went into it — though she realised their magical computer was cheating again, jumping straight at the answer without the long sequence of calculations a digital computer would need to produce every pixel of every frame. The starting image was familiar, the two big lobes on an axis with spiralling filaments stretching off their surface, and as the image was zoomed in — at a skewed angle against the plane to prevent getting 'caught' in anything too quickly — more familiar structures showed themselves, but at an angle and in detail Hermione didn't recall seeing before, dozens of bookshelves around them lighting up as the image zoomed in further and further — the programmer had taken advantage of the capacity for distributed processing to help crunch the numbers — colourful blobs reminding Hermione of the Horsehead Nebula and twisting three-dimensional spirals (almost DNA-like) and starbursts whipping by, occasional discontinuities as the algorithm that generated the colours had to be tweaked to prevent the aperture they were viewing from getting 'caught' in the structure, so they could still see the border, on and on...
No, this wasn't pre-rendered, the calculations to produce it were being done in real time. Elbert stopped zooming in, waved Payne forward, explained how the controls worked — there were more flashes of colour from the bookshelves as he scrolled around, and you'll notice there is a slight delay, it does take a moment for the mechanism to keep up. Yes, the maths behind this were ridiculous, but that's what happened when magic lets you cheat and jump straight to the answer.
They had one more demonstration planned. Elbert closed out the programme, and indicated a cabinet next to where the control panel was. He opened up the door, showing Payne the rack of programme cards inside. He pulled one out, turning it in his hand — a ceramic-and-bronze frame holding sheets of wire-suspended diamonds. Each card was equivalent to two sectors, a total of 256 reservoirs, or .25 kilocils. Now, obviously that was a tiny fraction of the data that the computer could hold — the total storage capacity of the cells on the bookshelves was equal to twenty-four thousand of these cards — but the cards were, obviously, far more mobile, and could be loaded with custom instruction sets for new programmes. (They were also re-programmable, of course.) The programme Elbert was about to run wasn't preloaded onto the device at all, with the exception of basic things like colour and geometry data — all of it was going to be loaded from these cards, to show how this sort of thing could work. Okay? Okay.
Elbert inserted the card into the slot in the control box. A couple button pushes, and there was a flash of rainbow light from one of the shelves as the data on it was copied out. He pulled out the card, and swapped it with a second from the cabinet, another flash of light as that data was copied. Then he swapped it for a third card, a couple button pushes and the control box was running the programme straight off the card.
Floating over the control box appeared an image of the Earth, in perfect, realistic colour — a team of mages and programmers had worked together to compile it, most of the visuals gathered through scrying, accurate to the three or four days they'd accumulated the images over. They'd done it so it was daytime everywhere — save for a small patch in the far north where it was always dark this time of the year, of course — exactly as it'd been at the time. Hermione could easily make out mountains and deserts and lakes, cities, the detail incredible...
The toxic clouds building over Indochina, India, and the Amazon were impossible to miss, tinted a murky yellow-orange.
Elbert explained how they'd gotten the data for it, that this was actually what everything looked like in real life. He waved Payne closer, explained how the controls worked, knock yourself out. Payne fiddled around a bit, reached up to turn the globe with a hand — oh, he could actually feel something! Yeah, the illusion included a faint physical sensation to make interacting with it easier, that was standard for this class of enchantment. After sweeping around for a little bit, Payne zoomed in on Europe, and closer and closer, the globe growing in size until large parts of it were past the range of the illusion, disappearing from view. Eventually, he got in as close as he could — an image of northwestern Europe as though from space, the North Sea and the countries making a sort of U shape around it, the British Isles and the Netherlands and Belgium and France and Germany and Denmark and the south of Sweden and Norway, the deep rich blue of the sea, the land patches in various shades of green, the occasional greyish blot of major cities, smaller towns little more than tiny dots, speckled with the bright white of snow, sparse flecks in most of the image but dense in the mountains of Scotland and all but covering Sweden and Norway. It was possible to zoom in further than this, go ahead and tap the area you want to look at and push a button to load up another image — they couldn't fit everything on one reservoir, obviously, finer details were on separate reservoirs...
Payne zoomed in close over their present location, the layout of the city streets ballooning up until they could clearly make out the buildings of the University itself. They got close enough that Hermione could pick out the building they were standing in, tiny ant-like figures of people visible along the streets and criss-crossing through green spaces. (Rather a lot of them, but this area of Groningen was quite busy these days.) That was as far as it could go, more detail than that would be too impractical to cover everything. Still pretty damn good though, don't you think?
Seemingly trying to catch them out on tricking him, Payne zoomed out again, and panned over to North America, zooming in on... Those were the Great Lakes, and the hand-looking shape was Michigan, so this must be Illinois. Yes, as Payne zoomed in further she made out a sizeable city on the lake shore, that had to be Chicago. The image blowing up bigger and bigger and bigger, zeroing in on a town somewhere in Illinois (probably, Hermione didn't know the internal borders of the States particularly well), and quickly finding his parents' house — it looked pretty unremarkable to Hermione, some kind of suburban residential neighbourhood composed of blocks divided by perfectly parallel rectangular streets, but clearly Payne was familiar enough with the neighbourhood to recognise it. Moving out again, he picked a spot somewhere in the heart of Africa, before long finding what was obviously a sizeable military-base-slash-refugee-camp not far from the edge of the toxic cloud (in the Congo, she was pretty sure). And he went out and then back in again, finding a construction project of some kind in the Alps — Hermione knew central offices for various international organisations were presently being built in especially defensible locations, deep in the Alps considered to be among the best options available in Continental Europe — and then a military base of some kind in India, just skirting the evil-looking orange cloud...
He must know the locations of these things off the top of his head, but Hermione wasn't surprised — presumably he was being kept up to date on goings-on around the world, his position allowing easy access to information she didn't have. She assumed he was checking different spots dotted around the world, confirming that they hadn't simply predicted he'd want to check their present location, confirming the map was as impressive as it looked.
He finished with checking some sort of installation toward the edge of the Amazon region — southern Colombia, Hermione thought — before nodding to himself and stepping away from the controls. "I'm satisfied. This is a hell of a thing you guys put together in only a few months. Honestly, when you said you had a prototype to show me, I didn't expect anything nearly so involved as this."
"We wanted to work out the kinks," Elbert drawled with a little shrug — the nonchalant image he was going for was somewhat ruined by the smug grin.
Rather more seriously, Gijs said, "And we wanted to provide the University, and the Commission, with a useable device as soon as possible. We can begin transferring data storage here as soon as possible — we don't know how much longer we're going to have reliable electricity, after all."
"Good point," Payne admitted, nodding. "And you can do that, simply move files from one format to the other?"
"I wouldn't call it simple, but yes. And yes, we're already working on complete design documents — we can start sending them out to other teams as soon as we have approval."
"Good, good. I imagine that shouldn't be too difficult — some of the other teams have already been having issues with blackouts." Turning to his assistant, he started, "Can we see about getting a meeting—"
"Hold on," Gwen interrupted. "We have one other thing to show you."
"Oh?"
"Yes, Hermione and I had an idea partway through building all this," with a wave at the stacks all around. "You see that box right next to the cabinet with the programme cards?"
Payne glanced that way, turned a raised eyebrow back at Gwen. "Yes...?"
Holding up a finger to wait, Gwen walked over to the box, lifted it up to set it down on top of the control box — it took some obvious effort, even with the weight-reducing enchantments it was still quite heavy. "Elbert, mind killing the projector?" While he switched off the display, the view of somewhere in the Amazon winking out, Gwen reached into the cabinet, pulled out an oversized, canvas book. She laid it open atop the control box, pulled a ceramic programme card out of a sleeve. He held it up to Payne, so he had a second to make it out — closed on all sides with tannish ceramic and a few polished bronze panels, it was about the width of Gwen's hand, about three times as long as it was wide. Runes were inscribed at various points on the surface, small enough they were a little hard to make out even close up. Gwen flipped a couple switches on the top of the box, a menu display appearing in white and green — Payne twitched, leaning in closer with a hiss of breath — she inserted the card into a slot, poked at the menu a couple times.
There was a brief delay, and then an illusion of the Earth appeared over the box — much smaller in size than the display from the room-dominating control box, but just as detailed.
For a moment, Payne just silently stared at it, eyes wide. Then, "Jesus fucking— Is that what I think that is?" he asked, pointing at the device.
"If you think it's a working personal computer," Elbert said, voice shivering a little with badly-suppressed laughter (clearly enjoying Payne's reaction), "then yes, it is."
Once again, Gijs was the one to come in with the more moderated perspective. "It's a much less powerful system — its memory capacity works out to around eight hundred kilocils, a bit over an eighth of the full-size system, and it can perform far fewer simultaneous operations. And it's not ready for universal use yet, we're still refining the operating system, and working out strategies to write images. Even getting a basic word processor to function correctly has been surprisingly difficult, for example. It's only useable by specialists, currently, but we should have a more user-friendly iteration of the software available before too long — the end of March, if we're lucky, but don't hold me to that."
"I think I can give you a month, for that! Christ. How did you even fit eight hundred of those cells in this thing?"
Gwen grinned. "It turns out, the mechanism operates normally inside expanded space. That part was Hermione's idea — we noticed that Elbert's team were transfiguring parts of the control box larger in order to fit the necessary runes for the enchantments, then letting the transfigurations lapse before assembly, and Hermione asked if there was any reason we couldn't tuck the entire device into expanded space. Honestly, the thought hadn't even occurred to me, I was too focussed on getting the bloody sorting enchantments to work..."
Payne turned a bemused raised eyebrow on Hermione. She gave him a helpless shrug, trying to ignore the faint sense of warmth on her cheeks. "Expanded space often has limited usefulness, since the area to be expanded must be enclosed on all sides with rigid walls. That rule can be bent a little — to include a slot for programme cards, for example — but it can't be broken. And the constraints of working in such restricted quarters often makes it impossible to build complex enchanted devices with an expanded internal mechanism, it's simple not worth the effort — I'm not surprised Gwen didn't think of it, I mean. We actually had to transfigure the case up to nearly room-sized, place all the components and properly anchor them, and then reverse the transfiguration and trigger the space expansion in concert. It's a very delicate operation, we broke three simpler test devices trying to get it to work.
"On the plus side, the wards defining the space to be expanded should also work as insulation — we were a little concerned about the possibility of a signal skipping from one device to another, but the secondary effects of the space expansion should prevent that."
Payne shook his head, a crooked look on his face she didn't know how to read. "Sure. Well, color me extremely impressed, this is...a lot more than I was expecting, honestly. You already made me a magic radio, and now you're coming in with this shit, Christ. I'm going to be in calls the rest of the afternoon, I think. We're going to need more of the database version," he said, nodding at the stacks filling the room, "for other institutions across the Continent, so, until I get back to you with further direction, go ahead and have your people manufacture some more cells in advance. Do you need anything in particular for that?"
"Nothing we don't already have access to," Gwen said. "It mostly uses the same materials as the radios."
"Right, right. As complicated as this stuff is, I expect we're going to get requests to have a specialist come in to oversee production — I hope you guys like your absurd magic computers, because I have a feeling this is going to be your job now."
...Hermione guessed she could live with that. The design and the enchanting were fascinating, after all, so at least she wouldn't be bored. And here she'd been concerned about whether she'd be able to contribute to the Commission's project at all — helping to invent magical computers definitely counted as a contribution, she thought.
(Some days she could almost see the new world potentially to come, like a wavering image half-hidden by distance and heat shimmer. But its shape grew clearer, day by day. There would be a future after all of this.)
(And Hermione would be there to help build it.)
Computer scientists, log off — it works the way I say it does. It's literal magic and a Star Wars fic, don't think about it too hard.