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It’s always felt to me weirdly like the Scholomance is stuck in the past. I mean we’re surrounded by modern miracles, marvels of magic and medicine, but come on. There’s no wifi, no phones, not even brick phones or bloody PCs. Bullshit I tell you. There’s phones in other enclaves, even the teensy golden enclaves they’ve been putting up in the last twenty years or so. The adults just want an excuse to get rid of their kids for four years, send them off to boarding school and never hear a peep. I mean it’s been twenty years since the Calling - there’s nowhere near as many mals now as ten years ago, let alone ten years before that. We have holidays, which must be twenty times more dangerous. Just put in some cables for fuck’s sake.
Anyway, these were the wonderful thoughts swirling through my head as we sat through another morning of Maleficaria studies. You’d think that since the mortality rate over four years of schooling has dropped from 75% to 5% that would justify a change in the curriculum, but oh no, of course, we still need just as much Maleficaria studies as our parents and their parents before them. Bloody curriculum. Teaching me things I have a roughly zero percent chance of needing to know. So we were learning about maleficaria of the deep ocean. The abyssal zone. Mals that can swim miles deep, never eating more than about once a year. The kind of mals that might inspire, say, a legend about a massive sea-serpent in some remote loch in Scotland. Oh so useful.
Bloody lakes. Not my fault I’m a Lake. Some stupid ancestor felt like cosplaying a body of water and a thousand years later we’re still at it. I was just choosing some expletives to use on that eejit in case someone invents time travel sometime soon, when the bloody evacuation alarm went off. We all know procedure - our parents had drilled it into us about a million times. Ward, Watch, Walk, et cetera, but I shit you not half the class jumped out of their skin and before you could kiss a frog they were Wrunning away.
“Lake!” someone shouted, as though I’d have any better chance than them of getting my dad there stat. Then I realised they’d lit up the mal and Dad had followed the thing in and there he was, whip-sword in one hand, casting with the other, shooting off a blast of power and - well yeah, that was it.
He twisted the watch-looking thing on his wrist to turn the alarm off. “Sorry guys, false alarm, it’s nothing to worry about.” His eyes scanned the room and, predictably, settled on me. I tried to stare him off but apparently he couldn’t catch the hint and sauntered over. “Toby,” he said. The rest of the room was in a state of some disarray - people righting desks and suchlike. Distractions left right and center. Thank god.
I hissed back at him, “Dad! I saw you yesterday! Make like you’re shopping and get!” Fortunately he caught my oh-so-subtle hints that I might be embarrassed, and he slightly awkwardly avoided the people that had by now amassed themselves for metaphorical prostration, heading towards the exit.
“Sorry again! Looked like a big guy but it was only a little one.” Like he was talking about a fish. Dads. Bleh.
“Mr Lake what was that?”
“Oh, just a hinkypunk. Nothing really.” Dad disappeared out the door and suddenly the correct thing to do was get back to work.
So there we all were, breathing heavily, energetic with nothing to spend it on. “Was that Orion Lake?” someone shouted, clearly a little slower than the rest.
“Yeah. Looking for some father-son time apparently,” I called back, “though it looks like this work isn’t going to do itself, no matter how hard I stare at it.” I hoped the rest of them would catch the hint and not try to draw me into the conversation, but apparently this was an excuse for some yap-anese. Y’know, when people yap- when something -aneeds doing. Which I was obviously going to have no truck with. Really into the topic of deep ocean mals. Not just trying to avoid talking about my dad. In the confusion people had swapped seats, and somehow Maggie had ended up next to me. Concern was etched on her face, and in her body language.
“Dads are meant to be embarrassing, you know.” she whispered. I looked up. I shrugged. I went back to my textbook. She sighed, and opened hers.
It didn’t really come as a surprise when, at dinner, she tried to confront me about it. I huddled closer to her, for less chance of being overheard. Not that anyone at the table particularly gave a shit, but still.
“Toby, your dad -”
“I know,” I said, “he’s meant to be embarrassing. It’s just, to hear anyone else talk about him, it feels like he’s this 10 foot tall giant out of a storybook, saving the universe from unimaginable horrors. It’s the same with Mum. People talk like all they do is jump from saving one life to the next. But they’re just people. I mean, I know they’ve done a lot of that stuff - I was even there for some of it. It’s just that people imagine that I’m like them, that I’m this storybook thing that doesn’t really interact with the real world. Or what’s in some ways worse, they imagine that I’m not - there’s this conceit that my parents are somehow a different kind of creature to everyone else. And then I’m supposed to act like my parents are unfailing and unflinching and undying or whatever, when they’re just Mum and Dad.” I breathed out slowly. “It just gets me down sometimes.”
“You know, that was surprisingly articulate.” Maggie said. “Sometimes I think I’m getting to you.”
I rolled my eyes, then screwed my courage to the sticking place and asked, “More importantly, I had a thought.” At this, she perked up.
“From you?”
“Ha ha. Well, the thought was - why don’t we have any gadgets? Any wifi or PCs or anything?”
“Well,” she began “the void -”
“Fuck the void, a hundred percent of the other enclaves I’ve been inside had service. I mean we couldn’t smuggle mund shit in ‘cos it wouldn’t work, but shouldn’t someone have made stuff for us to take in?”
“Umm…. I don’t actually know. But I do know where I could find out. It’s time…” she paused dramatically.
I preempted her: “For a library trip?”
“For a library trip.” She confirmed. “How did you guess?”
“Well in your books, isn’t it always time for a library trip?”
“My books! Nice one.”
“Errr….”
So yeah, we needed a library trip. Fortunately, I needed to catch up on the work I had been so assiduously avoiding, so I could come along.
“Let’s see, let’s see. Ah yes, here we are, ‘Magic and Technology, Third Edition, by Ibrahim Abdi’” Maggie got the book down from the shelf. It was about three inches thick.
“Is that the last time we’ll have to get up to get another book?” I asked.
“Well, you know, it’s hard to tell. Some books are cited even though it’s just a passing mention, which is why we’ve needed to check so many. And it’s nice to get up every now and again, even if it feels less efficient.”
“It’s great knowing someone who loves libraries. I get all the benefit of the knowledge with only like forty percent of the headache of its acquisition.” Maggie smiled at that.
We walked back to the desk across which we had strewn about a century of magical research. Maggie opened the book. It was a miracle, but my work remained in just the state I had left it. I tried to crack in, but only five minutes later Maggie appeared to have an answer for me. “Toby!” she said, “I’ve got it. The reason - “
“The reason we can’t have any bloody tech! Well?”
She coughed emphatically. “Before I was so rudely interrupted, I was saying that anything built in the void has entropic decay imposed on it by the universe. It’s a sort of Time Tax, if you will, that means that things age at a markedly faster rate, especially if they’re unprotected by something with ambient mana storage. It turns out it’s one of the reasons the school breaks down so much, and even to make tech that works while spending some time in an enclave you need some serious magical know-how.”
“Ah shit. And I suppose people have thought of making magical tech.” We both paused for a second. “...Queue the epic science montage!”
Maggie was clearly not impressed with me. “You can’t just say that! You have to actually do the epic science if you want an epic science montage! That’s just how it works!”
“Mmmm…” I said. “Shame we have to give up then. Well, I guess it was a good idea.”
“Would you like some help with the ‘epic science’, as you so eloquently put it?” she asked.
“Oh alright then, let’s give it a go. Evening work period tomorrow?”
“Sure. We can tell the others at breakfast.”
Later that night, I thought about Maggie. I pictured her in my mind. Long blonde hair - not exactly unkempt but walking that line. Brown eyes. Skin the colour of oats. She was small, but in my imagination she loomed large. Despite my complaints about storybook characters, she felt a little like one to me. I could be a sidekick to her misunderstood genius in some Sherlock knock-off maybe. She could be the protagonist in some literary novel that thought too much of itself but somehow spoke to people. I span in my thoughts til I drifted to sleep.
Then breakfast came round, and it became apparent it was my responsibility to organise this trip - Maggie had her nose in a book. So I interrupted the general clutter of conversation - “Guys. Guys! Trip to the artifice labs after supper.”
“Nerd! Doing extracurricular work.” Olive yelled back.
“Fucking geek, calling me a nerd.”
“What’re we even gonna do in work period, dickhead?”
“Work is what we’re gonna do. We’ll explain when we’re there. Numbskull.” Though it may be hard to believe, things devolved from there, while Maggie carefully ignored us, her eyes still glued to her book.
“Anyway guys, that’s about the idea of it, magic up the tech so it doesn't age too fast with constant void exposure.” Dinner wasn’t quite done, but we’d gone on down to the artifice labs. During Maggie’s explanation, I had been getting out stuff that might be useful in our experimentation. I’d done some more research and had come up with the idea of measuring entropic decay with a quartz crystal - under certain circumstances, a quartz crystal will oscillate 32,768 times a second, which lets you measure the passage of time and (we hoped) entropic decay in a particular location. Maggie held out a phone from someone who hadn’t been warned about induction. It was dead, predictably. Their parents must have been scared shitless - their kid disappears and then goes no contact for a few months. But anyway, their loss was our gain. “This is the sample that we’re going to be working with.” Maggie said. “This is going to be our gold standard of complexity.”
“Why is the Scholomance different from any other enclave?” Micheal asked. He was tall, muscular and very American.
“Well.” Maggie said “It’s a slightly different kind of enclave. People who are pure mana can tell the difference between a Golden enclave and an old-fashioned one. And this somehow feels like a Golden enclave, even though the technology wasn’t known at the time.”
“What’s different about Golden enclaves?” someone asked.
Maggie pursed her lips. She couldn’t exactly say without a massive argument that wouldn’t be particularly productive. No-one appreciates it when you say their home was built on dead kids. I interrupted. “We aren’t entirely sure, but we know there’s two sets of spells. It’s possible that the extra spells used to turn this proto-enclave into the Scholomance had some unpredictable effects. But back to the topic of our sample - maybe we can get it working again if we somehow reverse the decay?”
Maggie snorted “Reverse time? Not likely. The school set me a paper about time travel and there’s no way to do it at the mana cost that we’d need. I mean, we could do it once, but it would be very expensive, highly likely to blow up in our faces and largely pointless.” She rolled up her sleeves. “No, if we needed to do that, the most practical way to experiment would be to wait till next term and research in the break. But for now we can work out how this thing works. I mean, it’s got to be pretty simple right? It’s completely non-magical.”
There may have been some general skepticism at that statement, or maybe it was just me.
I may have felt vindicated a few hours later when we hadn’t made much progress. We had two teams - one trying to break down how the phone worked and another starting with some electronic scraps we’d foraged for, working out how to make simple magical tech. The first team hadn’t made any progress, so it was slowly bleeding members to the second. We’d built and enchanted some simple circuits, and as far as we could tell it was working how we’d hoped. They didn’t need much mana, but it seemed like when we tried to up the complexity, the mana cost went up exponentially. So we’d be fine with a few transistors, and maybe could enchant a brick phone, but nothing developed in the last thirty years. “Now that I come to think of it, most enclave tech is pretty simple.” Olive said. “Maybe other artificers have gotten this far and decided that this is as good as it gets.”
“That seems reasonable.” I said.
It felt like an appropriate time to check in with the first team and reevaluate. I looked over to their table. There were only three of them left, and Maggie was holding her head in her hands. She seemed to be taking it as a personal failure that they hadn’t been making progress. “Guys!” I called across to them, “You’ve been at this for two hours - probably there’s no progress to be had, at least not easily.”
So yeah, we decided to regroup.
A few days later, at dinner, Maggie was giving an impromptu lecture. “So these are the problems we have. We have exponential growth in mana cost and while the constant might be close to one, close to one doesn’t particularly cut it when we will need about a billion transistors. From what we have so far we believe that we get an order of magnitude worse for every twenty thousand transistors. So basically, a brick phone with about a hundred thousand transistors is plausible to cover with an enchantment, but once we get into the millions we run into major problems. There is a question of whether a particular type of enchantment would have slower growth, but frankly the thaumaturgy behind it seems vast and largely unexplored. So, does anyone have any bright ideas?” She stopped there, opening it up to the group.
“Well, we could - “ Someone began, before stopping themselves.
“Which types of enchantment have we tried?” Micheal asked.
Maggie motioned to me, because she’d been madly searching for research for the last week, while I’d been in charge of the practical team. “It would be quicker to list the types we haven’t tried. We haven’t tried using a reviser, because no-one inside the school has one. We haven’t tried enchantments with an element of sacrifice, because the only major difference is the level of power, and there’s no bugs lying around to test it on. Other than that? We’ve been pretty thorough, I think.”
That quieted him.
“Well,” Maggie said, “if anyone has any ideas, let me know.”
And that was that. Well, until -
“I have an idea that is obviously impractical,” said Olive, “If the problem is the exponential, why don’t we just make the phone modular? Split it into parts that are about a hundred thousand transistors each, then fuel them individually. Then there’s only two problems, as far as I can see. First, the impracticality of making the thing - we’d need to enchant at micro scale, or we’d end up with phones the size of houses. Second, we’d need to completely redesign the architecture from the ground up - a problem which I know fuck-all about and that massive phone companies consider non-trivial.” She paused significantly.
“Thank god that research about phone design is finally paying off.” Maggie said. “It’s largely modular already. Technically it’s modular at two scales - at the largest scale and at the smallest - and there’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to sandwich something in between. We can start with more research about architectures, low-level stuff, to work out how much effort it would take to redesign, then decide from there. Which is the second problem spoken for. And as for the first -”
I interrupted. “‘You’re a wizard, Maggie!’”
“Indeed. I think we might be able to figure something out. The only problem is that this kind of stuff isn’t really available in the library - it’s designed to teach us about the magical, not the mundane. I think the quickest way would be to meet up over the holidays and spend some time looking for books out there, then come back and study them next term. In the meantime, we can shop around for someone who nerds out about circuit design and old hardware, but really, what are the odds of such a person existing?”
You may not have been educated in an environment like the Scholomance. In fact, statistically speaking, it’s pretty unlikely, so you may not have a very good idea of the odds of such a thing. The Scholomance consists of roughly ten thousand students between the ages of fourteen and eighteen who are mostly the children of wizards - people who bend the very fabric of reality to their will. These kids are then abruptly removed from many modern conveniences, including the internet and any devices they may have owned. Then they spend three quarters of the year away from their friends, families and society at large, locked away with mostly books and other awkward teenagers for company. Unsurprisingly, this produces nerds of many species - it is a well-known fact that while the first set of luggage a new Scholomance student brings in consists mainly of clothes, the second is often almost entirely books. So yeah, I thought we might find the nerd we were looking for.
Well, we found what we were looking for - a nerd so nerdy he dwarfed the rest of us, a giant among humans. And his name was called Diego. He was Peruvian, and apparently preferred to be called a geek. So we approached him. We sent a party of three on this pilgrimage - myself, Olive and Maggie - the nerdiest three we could put together. We hoped that he might help us out of the goodness of his heart, but we knew he might be ruthless, so we had prepared for negotiations. We made our way to his room, having pre-arranged a date and time, and thus we stood warily before the entrance to that hallowed place - apparently he rarely left his room, in order to best maximise his reading time.
You might guess who knocked, and if you guessed it would come down to me, you’d be right. “Diego?” I asked as I knocked. He opened the door, and I was slightly shocked at his appearance, though I hope it didn’t show on my face. In another world he might have been a jock - he was slightly gangly, but lithe and athletic-looking. His hair was shoulder-length, and beautifully conditioned. His eyes were brown orbs, and set against the general symmetry of his face they were beautiful.
“Would you like to come in?” he asked.
“Of course!” I said, and ushered the others in. There was a pause, then I began. “So, we have a bit of a problem, that we think you might be able to give us a hand with.” I stopped, idly surveying the room, then suddenly I was shocked to see what looked like a PC setup, complete with gaming chair, monitor, headphones - the works. “Hang on, is that a PC?”
“But yes! I built it a couple of years ago - it’s enchanted to get around the problems with normal tech. It’s a little clunky, but it works just fine for the games I like to play. Mostly single-player stuff, you understand. I have myself connected to wifi I set up just outside the school gates, which makes multiplayer a bit of a shitshow.”
We were pretty shocked at this point - hence him getting so many words out without an interruption. “How did you make it?” Maggie asked
“Well, I figured out how to enchant circuit boards - then there’s this tricky problem where it gets really expensive mana-wise when you build anything big. So I was stuck there for a while, long enough to go home, where I asked my mom, who’s a pretty smart cookie. She said I could maybe break the PC down into smaller parts, then enchant each part. Then the only question is the scale. Turns out it’s not too tough to enchant transistors individually, which sidesteps the problem entirely, and just requires micro-scale spells, which can make massive batches. So yeah, I figured it out. Took me a while, but I modified some designs and built a PC from the ground up.”
“Could you help us build more?”
“Why not! It’ll give me someone to game with. What was the problem you needed help with? It seems to have slipped your minds.”
Maggie explained, while Olive and I sat there dumbfounded. What a wonderful guy.
So yeah, that’s the story of how the Scholomance got tech. We didn’t really do much to be honest. Not that I’m complaining.