Protagonism

Previously

"I'm trying to find Laura Ferno. You're her emergency contact," is what the fellow on the phone leads with, Hollywood-style, no greeting.

"Is it an emergency?" Natalie Ferno asks, mildly refreshed to be getting to the point of the conversation so quickly. She keeps a thick pad of A4 next to the phone. It is measurably thicker with the weight of doodles. People, in Nat's experience, can lock themselves into a kind of verbal holding pattern, constantly emitting syllables while never advancing the conversation.

"It's two halves of an emergency," says the man.

"Who is this?"

"Anil Devi, I worked with your sister at Hatt Group."

"You fired her," Nat observes.

Anil Devi, personally, worked with Laura Ferno only for a few weeks altogether while she was still in gainful employment. The decision to fire her was made completely in his absence, for reasons completely unrelated to him. "No," he explains. On the other hand, Devi is contacting Natalie Ferno as a formal representative of Hatt Group with a view to reinstating Laura in some - any - professional capacity as soon as possible, which means he is Hatt Group's front end from Nat's perspective. So, "Yes," he adds. "It doesn't matter. We need her to come back."

"Why?"

"That's confidential."

"Is it," Nat asks again, "an emergency?"

"...I need to find her very urgently."

So, no. Nat hangs up.

*

Then she thinks again.

She hasn't heard from Laura in weeks. But Laura's like that. She is a low-maintenance relative.

Nat also hasn't heard from Nick in that amount of time. That's much less usual.

If Hatt Group have been reduced to pursuing emergency contacts, then Laura's not responding to their phone calls or emails.

Laura loved that job. She saw a serious chance of becoming an astronaut in that job. Losing the chance devastated her. Laura would never pass up another chance at that chance. She would never ignore them if they reached out.

Nat calls Laura's mobile. The call goes straight to voicemail, as if the phone itself has ceased to exist.

She calls Laura and Nick's land line. Answering machine.

She calls Nick's mobile. Voicemail.

Neither are on IM. She emails them both, then drums her fingers for a while, not really expecting any response.

She calls Nick's school. Nick is AWOL, and has lost his job.

She calls Nick's friends, although she doesn't know many of their numbers. The story is consistent: Nick and Laura are travelling around the world. They're probably in Japan right now.

No contact information. No forwarding numbers. Not even a postcard.

It's an interesting combination of stories. Laura's the kind of person who could go off-grid for a month before anybody noticed. Nick Laughon isn't, but he's the primordial avatar of itchy feet, so if he needed to disappear, he could buy about the same amount of time with a quick one-liner like "I'm going around the world"...

Two half-emergencies. One: Hatt Group desperately, desperately need Laura Ferno back. Two: Laura and her boyfriend are missing. Missing, presumed...

At this point the possibilities become a forest.

No presumption. Nat needs more data.

*

She arrives at Laura's house not long before dusk. It's the greyish, coldish part of the British day where you squint a little and go to remove sunglasses that you aren't wearing.

There is a man at Laura's door. Facing the door, as if having just knocked. Natalie strides up behind him. "You must be Anil Devi," she announces, surprising him.

He turns. Spiky black hair, the kind of face which seems to be perpetually grinning regardless of mood. "Laura!"

"No."

Devi blinks. "Natalie. Natalie Ferno. Laura didn't say you were identical twins."

"We aren't identical."

"That's why."

"Go home," Natalie tells him. "If I find her, I'll tell her to call you." She moves around Devi, producing a spare key, and goes to unlock the door.

"Did she tell you why she was fired?" Devi asks.

"Maybe."

"Did she tell you she was trying to resurrect your mother?"

Natalie stops on the threshold.

She says, carefully, "I was wondering how much you people knew. Yes, word got around. But it didn't work, obviously. Otherwise you'd never have fired her."

"It worked," Devi says.

Natalie's eyes widen.

"Sort of," Devi adds, hurriedly.

*

Inside, Devi tells the story.

"The lab says it's dead meat," he says. "Real meat, dead but formerly living. Real DNA from a completely unknown taxon. Maybe some proto-hominid which evolved in a radioactive wasteland for a few hundred thousand years. And that, in itself, is a bloody significant mystery."

"Maybe it was intelligently designed," Natalie suggests.

Devi shrugs. "Number of biologists in this conversation, zero. But the real point is: she brought it back. Real mass, comparable with a human. From a place which strictly doesn't exist. We've got no idea how she did it using essentially no mana, but we sure as hell need to know. Hint: mass-energy conservation is over."

"Death is over," Natalie says.

"Yeah," Devi says. "Death is potentially over. You see why I pushed this into emergency territory."

"I see why you got permission to violate some NDAs," Natalie says.

"We heard you were a professional mage too," Devi says. "It turns out we approached you in university at the same time as Laura. All things considered, Ed Hatt thought it was worth cutting you in."

"Alright," Natalie says. "We're on the same page."

"Where is Laura?" Devi asks.

Natalie shares what she's worked out so far. "All Laura's magical equipment is missing. No sign of a break-in, which means Laura took it all with her. Laura's daily carry is enough that she clatters when she moves, but her whole collection weighs a lot and is worth a lot more. She owns one-of-a-kind pieces which she built with her own hands. She'd never fly with it. Forget cameras and lenses, that is the kind of valuable property which mysteriously vanishes from hold luggage. Contradiction."

"So let's say they're still in this country," Devi surmises. "When was the last time you spoke to her?"

"Just after she was fired." Natalie recalls a despairing and unhappy Laura Ferno in search of a source of limitless magical energy, named Ra. "I called her an idiot. ...You know what the real puzzle here is? Nick's missing as well."

"Nick...?"

"Laughon. Her boyfriend. Laura's a bad scientist. You were right to fire her. Recklessness, unsafe experimentation. The drawing of rash conclusions heavily influenced by personal feelings. For Laura to disappear for weeks on a quest to do something bizarre and misguided isn't remotely out of character.

"But Nick's missing too. He's the grounded half of the relationship. He should have talked her down. He'd be the one to bring her--"

Oh.

"--back... to... reality."

Oh no.

"She's summoned a demon into the body of her boyfriend," Natalie announces.

Devi does not have a coherent immediate response to this. Demons are not a standard component of the magical engineering canon.

"What kind of demon?" he eventually manages.

"A demon! A malevolent spirit. 'Ra'."

"I'm sorry. What kind of mage are you?"

"Theoretical thaumic physicist."

Devi changes gear.

Terminology has become somewhat confused in recent decades. Technically speaking, magical engineers are supposed to refer to themselves exclusively as "mages", because of the abbreviation, MagE. "Wizard", "witch", "warlock" and "sorcerer" are generally associated with fictional characters or crazy people; "magician" and "conjuror" are reserved for stage performers. All of this is perfectly clear from the perspective of those working in the magical community. Unfortunately, on the outside, it's fuzzier. There's no trademark or law to prevent non-mages from calling themselves mages. It's not even a title which requires a certain qualification, like "doctor".

There are "psychics" who call themselves mages. These people cheerfully lift choice terms from magical engineering, craft them into something that's obviously nonsense to anybody with a day's experience with the real topic, and dupe saps for cash. The popular quantum mechanics books have become almost impressive in their creative meaninglessness.

One could very easily get to the end of such a book and consider oneself a "theoretical thaumic physicist".

"Why do you think Laura would summon a demon?" Devi asks.

Natalie's reasoning is apparently effortless. "She's going to try her experiment again. To do that, she needs a ridiculous amount of mana, more than she can generate in years by herself. Ra has that power."

Devi chooses each word carefully, as if stepping forward across ice. "Is... is 'Ra' dangerous?"

Ra was last seen trying to liberate enough geological mana to blow up Iceland.

"Yes," says Natalie.

"Does Laura know this?"

"Oh, my, yes," Natalie says.

"Is Laura really stupid enough to trust this... being?"

"Entirely the wrong question," Natalie says. "You should be asking if she's stupid enough to think she can control it. And she is. She is actually, in her own way, a pretty formidable human being. Up to a point."

Devi doesn't want to ask the last question. He does anyway.

"What does Ra want?"

Natalie's expression darkens, but she doesn't answer.

*

The computer room.

Natalie knows Laura's password. She shoulder-surfed it a year or two ago, never mentioned it, and Laura's never changed it. Natalie would feel guilt, if there was time.

She pulls up the browser cache. Last activity, weeks ago. Printed directions to a particular postcode in the West Country, an isolated compound in a forest in the back of beyond. A private magical research laboratory called the Chedbury Bridge Institute.

"What kind of magic do you do?" Devi asks casually, hovering behind her. Natalie assumes that he has shoulder-surfed Laura's password in turn. She makes a mental note to change it once he isn't looking.

"Mmm? I know eset," Natalie says.

"Anything else?"

"No."

"You only know one spell?"

"Yup."

"You don't know uum?"

"Why would I learn a spell which does nothing?"

Devi solidifies his conclusion about Natalie Ferno: layperson. Laura, he thinks, is the brains of the family. Natalie is a neo-pagan imitator of her sister, a chanter of nonsense-spells at summer solstice near particular rocks. Natalie is interpreting the evil of pedestrian humans in the most meaningful terms she's familiar with. Natalie is a 'witch' - which is to say, a crazy person.

Devi asks, "What's the postcode?"

Natalie reads it out.

"Noted," says Devi. He goes to leave. "I'm calling the police."

"Wait!"

"'Wait'?" asks Devi, loading as much scepticism and frank disgust into this word as possible.

"What will you tell them?"

"'Laura Ferno's been abducted by her boyfriend, Nick Laughon.'"

"Nick Laughon hasn't done anything! There's no sign of forced abduction. Laura's being manipulated!"

"Do I care? Do the police care? Two people are missing, and we have reason to believe one's in danger from the other. So magic is involved. Is magic a separate legal jurisdiction?"

"I think we can straighten this out without getting the police involved--" Natalie begins.

"Let's get Nick Laughon's body in a jail cell," Devi says, "and, if you really think it's going to make a difference, you can attempt an 'exorcism'. Grind some herbs, draw runes in chalk and mouse blood or whatever it is you do."

"What?"

"I don't buy 'demon'," Devi says. "I'm veering strongly towards 'scumbag'. And I don't think you know what thaumic physics even is."

Nobody can find the biological component of magic. Nobody knows which cells in the human body register magical activity, or why it takes a year-plus of training before they work. It's mythical and inconsistent and inexplicable. Maybe it's a system of signals which is always there, but the human brain needs to be tuned before they can be unscrambled into something detectable. Like language acquisition.

It doesn't matter.

Natalie Ferno and Anil Devi both sense the reaction starting in the living room. Their heads turn almost simultaneously to look at the same unseen point on the other side of the wall.

Devi dashes back through.

The weapon resembles a silver, mechanical lotus flower. It is a sophisticated, nest-like fan of magic rings and nodules, engineered like a pop-up book, probably small enough when flat to fit into a breast pocket. The density of mana flux at its focal point is so bright in the thaumic spectrum that standing in its presence is physically painful. There's heat radiating off it too, and curls of invisible chemical vapour, the precursor to a thaumically-accelerated bomb.

Nobody has built a magic-based bomb before, and not for lack of trying. Devi and Natalie know this. They're looking at something delicate and brand new and unique, like a Fabergé egg. It is a compact packet of hugely inventive destructive power. It sits on a mundane coffee table in the cramped living room of a beige house, almost too beautiful to be allowed to detonate.

For a split second, neither of them can look away from it.

"How did that get in here?" Nat says.

"Run!" Devi screams, physically pushing Nat towards the door.

"Wait," Nat says.

Devi is, again, aghast at Natalie's suggestion. "What are you doing?"

"Wait!" Nat twists past him, lunges for a cupboard and pulls out the one piece of equipment which Laura didn't take with her: a one-point-eight-metre oaken bo.

Nat didn't hear a door move. Nat has sixty percent of the theory of invisibility laid down. The rest is just boring practical problems, like fitting the spell into fewer than ten human minds and a piece of machinery which weighs less than a tonne. The short title is "Fast-adapting Bezier-controlled duplex oracles". The only major question marks are around wavelength assignment--

She hasn't heard the door move, which means the invisible man must still be here. He must have been here the entire time they were in the house. Hovering, silently. Listening in.

Surely he left time for a getaway. Surely that's enough time to find him and wring the abort code out of him.

Nat closes her eyes for one second. In any other situation, she'd be searching, with extreme difficulty, for a volume of empty air which was detectably consuming magic. Like a poltergeist. But the house is saturated with thaumic radiation. So instead she hunts for the shadow.

It's in the hall. Nat keeps her eyes screwed up, it's the only way to find the thing reliably. Lacking room to swing, she propels the bo end-first, directly into the shadow's midsection.

Transmuting light into invisible chi particles and back is one thing. Blocking a heavy impact from a physical object is an entirely different engineering problem. The trespasser's cloak shuts off with a snap like a mousetrap. The man behind the cloak crumples up, gasping. He is a nobody, his entire image is cultivated to project "nondescript". A shirt, some shoes, hair, an age.

Natalie hits him again with the bo, bloodying his nose-- a technique which bojutsu strictly outlaws, as Natalie would know if she'd ever studied it. She catches his wrist and hurls him back into the living room, directly at the bomb. The man scrambles to avoid falling into it, and ends up crashing into the coffee table and injuring his knee quite badly.

"Jesus Christ!" is Anil Devi's reaction.

"Turn the bomb off or die," Natalie tells the trespasser. She is almost having to shout over the machine now. She holds the bo in front of her, defensively, and circles around to cover Devi. "You know you have time!" Without turning around, she adds, "Devi, don't move!"

Devi doesn't move.

"Like I care," says the man, sneering. "Like I'm singular! Elth ra mukhth entana daneda."

It's the last exotic ingredient. The syllables spill from the man's lips like virulent red muck dripping from a test tube into the cauldron. And like witches and wizards, psychics and media, all three mages feel a figurative foreshock of the imminent future.

Natalie grabs Devi's hand. "Anh zero EPTRO zui--"

*

There is a small discontinuity.

Over the street from Laura Ferno's address is - not unexpectedly - another row of houses. The house directly opposite has an immaculate garden in front of it. Millimetre-long grass, raked pebbles, perfect red and blue poinsettias. It takes Devi a moment to realise that this is where he has landed.

He is upright, splayed against the back of the garden and the wall beneath the house's shattered front bay window, with one arm hooked over into the house itself. The wall he's lying against is broken, as if hit by a roughly Devi-shaped truck. Devi is strewn with tiny pieces of broken double glazing, and it takes him another moment to realise that they are still being held a few centimetres away from his skin by Natalie Ferno's force field.

He recognises the bird bath. He is looking at it from the opposite angle.

"Ferno?" he shouts, and hears nothing. His organs and bones judder. The field obviously absorbed a huge percentage of the shock.

Over the road at the epicentre, there isn't a house anymore, just a blackened pit. The blast has been impressively precise, barely scorching the houses on either side. Pieces are still falling from the sky; a hard rain of roof tiles and frame. It's unreal.

".........." says a voice.

"What?" Devi shouts, looking around. He feels like a three-dimensional bruise.

Natalie has landed inside, on the other side of the same wall. In fact, she has landed on a sofa, and they are therefore seated back to back. They are still joined, through the broken window. She is holding on to his wrist, latched to it like a hawk's talon.

"I said I changed my mind," Nat says, louder. "You should call the police."

As Natalie releases her grip, the shield closes down, and both of them are now covered in fresh glass and rubble and dust, like a parsley garnish.

They never place the call, but miraculously the police appear all by themselves.

*

The sun has gone down. There are dozens of vehicles and seemingly hundreds of police. The street is filled with flashing lights and high visibility vests.

Natalie has learned her lesson. Speaking to the shadow-chinned, unflappable layperson officer who takes her statement, she avoids raising hypotheses of consciousness displacement, or of megalomaniacal minds invading from other planes of magical existence. She structures her words factually.

"My sister is missing since four weeks ago, and her boyfriend is too. Either he's abducted her, or both of them are in the hands of some third party. A man named Ra just blew up their house to stop me from tracking them, but he failed, and I know where they are. I think Laura's involved in something really dangerous, and we need to find her right now, and by 'we' I mean you and me and that guy there." She points at Anil Devi, who is in the middle of giving his own statement, and who looks up for a second, confused.

"Why you?" the officer asks, calmly, scribbling notes. Anachronism? But the scene is far too noisy to record audio.

Nat says, "Because Laura always carries a particular collection of magical equipment with her. With a high-powered eset spell and a bit of trigonometry I can find her behind a kilometre of steel. In any case, this is a magic problem. Laura's a mage, I'm a mage, Anil's a mage, the bomber was a mage. Do you have mages on the force?"

"No," says the officer.

"Magic is real," Natalie says. "Magic crime has been real since 1998. Magic terrorism has just this hour become real. You need expert outside consultation.

"And I think--" And Natalie stops for a second, because this last thought hasn't come from the right place in her mind. Natalie Ferno is a thinker who starts from a collection of facts and turns the handle until they extrude a conclusion. But this idea is from her imagination, inflammatory, fabricated to get the police's attention. And yet, it may almost add up.

"I think," she says, "my sister might have been radicalised."

*

Time is a factor.

They won't let them go.

Natalie Ferno and Anil Devi are kept around for hours, hours, having information dragged out of them. Descriptions of the late, lamented bomber, whose description is entirely irrelevant. Descriptions of the structure of the magic bomb, a breed of device that every military organisation in the world has been trying to build. (Both Natalie and Devi, despite being questioned separately, instinctively play it cagey. In truth, given a few days to compare notes, they could produce blueprints and operating instructions in multiple languages.) How do you think the bomb worked? Well, largely, by magic. How do you think he got into the house? A spare key, possibly stolen from a fake rock in the garden, or maybe even given to him by Laura herself. How did you know there was someone in the house? Magic. How did you survive the explosion? Magic, idiots!

Injuries to people in nearby houses, damaged hearing, property damage, vehicular damage, falling rubble, forensic analysis, fingerprints, insurance, thousands of flash photographs.

This is a race against time, Natalie Ferno tells them outright, over and over again. The bomb was planted just at the instant that she and Devi discovered the next link in the trail. If that information wasn't critically time-sensitive, the house would not have blown up. Laura's involved in this thing right now.

"We're taking this very seriously. We're doing everything we can to find your sister as soon as possible."

It takes Natalie several hours to realise that this isn't incompetence, some bloated civil machine that takes time to get up to speed. The police have been playing the information hygiene game for much longer than she has. Information goes into an investigation, and it doesn't come out. And she's on the wrong side of the wall.

*

"Alright, here's the thing," says the sergeant who first interviewed Natalie. "Your offer of expertise in the magical field has been percolating upwards, and it seems to have found someone in charge who's keen to get a magical opinion or two."

"Here?" Devi asks.

"This is a bomb site," says the sergeant, whose last name is Henders and whose first name might as well be Sergeant. "We can do bomb sites, and it'll still be here in the morning. Over at Chedbury, though, is a big pile of magical machinery which nobody on site is entirely sure what to make of."

"Forensic thaumaturgy," Devi suggests.

"Limited, unofficial scientific consultation," is how Henders puts it. "Cooperating with our inquiries."

"Like you can afford my consulting rate," says Devi. "I'm kidding."

Natalie asks, "What actually happened at Chedbury? What did they find? Did they raid the place? Did they find my sister?"

"Didn't say, ma'am," Henders says.

"If they'd found my sister, they've have said so, right?"

"I couldn't say."

"And they wouldn't need us there. Right?"

"I couldn't say."

You guys are good at this. "All right. We need a minute to grab equipment."

Devi's car, formerly parked not-quite-outside the Ferno residence, has been lightly torched and is missing a window. Still, its contents are pristine: an eclectic assortment of light-to-heavy aerospace engineering equipment. "Enough to do most jobs," he explains to Natalie, handing her a fistful of Kaprekar driver/linkers. "It'd be better if we could swing past work, but it's in the wrong direction. What are you bringing?"

Natalie indicates that all of her equipment amounts to a single earring. Empty fingers, bare wrists, nothing up her sleeves. "Theoretical physicist, remember? I can spell, but I don't practice."

"But you just cast that force field. 'Only one spell' my arse."

"Two spells. That and eset. Honest. In any case, I'm completely out of mana right now."

Devi raises one eyebrow, and once again draws his own conclusion. He hands her a plastic box containing the unscrewed pieces of his magic staff.

Natalie asks, "How long would it take you to put together a basic chi scanner? Something that can find my sister in a haystack."

Devi snorts. "Like, a hundred and fifty seconds."

"Good. Then I need something that can read people's True Names remotely."

Devi opens his mouth to respond to this, then closes it, and smiles. He has no idea how to do this. It is an old sensation, and a familiar one, and an exciting one.

"I can give you some pointers," Natalie suggests.

"I don't take dictation," Devi says. "I'm an engineer. You're the client. You give me requirements. I actualise."

*

They're in the back of the police car, headed west. The passenger compartment is roomy. Natalie shuffles uncomfortably in her seat, becoming a little carsick from facing the wrong way. Devi's on the other side, distracted by his engineering task, trying syllable sequences. There's a constant clattering of equipment. He looks like he's assembling a rifle.

"I don't believe in demons," he says.

Natalie looks at him, waiting for something else.

"I specifically don't believe in a demon called Ra," he continues. "...Which means I have a problem, because who blew the house up?"

"You heard the spell segment," Natalie says. "You heard the fellow's Name."

"Sure, but who was he? Who blows a house up? What is actually going on here? I feel like I'm coming in late. Like I missed acts one and two."

"You've got a monster in your basement," Natalie explains. "You've seen that physical things can come back from T-world. Would you believe that a mind can come back? Call it what you want. 'Hijacking'."

"But that wasn't Nick Laughon."

"Ra isn't one person," says Natalie.

"You mean, like... an organisation?"

Natalie doesn't say anything.

*

Chedbury Bridge Institute is its own private world, lurking behind tall electrified fences off an inaccessible road in the Chedbury forest. From the outside, none of its buildings are visible through the fence and trees, even in daylight. The track up to the entrance is not signposted. The Institute doesn't want to be found. There's work going on inside, and it would rather not be disturbed.

Devi and Natalie are driven straight in, indirectly revealing that any excitement occurring at this location, any kind of armed police raid, happened offscreen and is long since over. The Institute is four or five two-storey buildings made of stylishly modern sand-coloured bricks, almost new. It's close to midnight now, but all the exterior and interior lights are on. There are police all over, specialist vans and dogs, garbled radio chatter. An unusual number of men carry black rifles.

There's a weird cold atmosphere, an aftermath atmosphere.

Henders lets Devi and Natalie out. Devi's completed magic machine is quite heavy, six rings all on one wrist, some up to half a metre in diameter. They are kept from falling off by his staff, a conventional steel model, effective without being flashy. Devi turns the machine on using a long and slightly confused spell which clearly needs refactoring.

The first readings come in. Having lacked the time to build any kind of modulator, they come in through Devi's hand as inscrutable flux changes. He has to perform most of the decoding in his head. "Zui for you," he reports. "And thelet for me, we already knew that. No bindings for any of the cops. Just fuzz. Hah!"

Henders comes around and joins them after a brief conversation with the officer in charge of the site.

"When we arrived they were in the middle of tearing some machine down," he says. "Something they obviously wanted to hide. It's at the other end of the site." He nods at Devi's machine. "That thing's not going to break anything, is it? Not going to destroy any evidence?"

"Totally passive," Devi assures him cheerfully.

"Alright then. Stay behind me, please. No wandering off, no gawping."

He leads them on the most direct route possible, threading between the buildings and across darkened lawns with benches. At one point a windowless police van pulls away past them, out of a secondary car park towards the exit.

"That van has at least six passengers in it," Devi hisses, after aiming his machine at it. "Maybe seven or eight."

"You can't tell exactly how many?"

"I can't separate them. They're all Named ra."

"Hmm."

"'Hmm'? This is what you mean by Ra being more than one person?"

"Ra was an accident," Natalie says. "Accidents happen. There's a lot of magic happening in the world, and it's only increasing. Why shouldn't an accident happen more than once? Mass-energy conservation may or may not be over. But a mind is just information, right? The integral of experience with respect to time. It's just a vector. There is no conservation law for information."

"So the Ra whom Laura's working with and the Ra who blew up her house were different people," Devi says.

"And the same person," Natalie says.

She shivers.

Around another corner, she catches sight of something. Inside another building, plainly visible through the windows, is a tall machine with a weird and serious familiarity to it.

It's a telescope, or at least derived from telescope ancestors. The main optical tube is about three metres long and seventy-five centimetres in diameter, polished black. Its range of motion is wrong. A full range of right ascension, but twice the usual declination, a feature useless to terrestrial telescopes. It is aimed down into the Earth at a steep angle, with the eyepiece only available from a raised platform. It's a shiny and new and highly specialised piece of equipment. Natalie looks carefully, and sees two cooperating oracles fitted over the end, designed to detect passing magical particles and transmute them into visible light in the most convenient available wavelengths.

"Chi astronomy," she breathes. Chis don't interact. You don't need to be on a high mountain in Chile, hundreds of miles away from light pollution sources, to study them. You can look right down through the Earth. You just need a quiet room with blackout curtains, and a mathematician for the servomotor firmware.

"No gawping," Henders calls.

This device reduces Natalie's experiments to cheap hack jobs. The Chedburians are ahead of her. She'd kill for their data.

*

They're brought to a large hall, a classic magical gymnasium with a standard D/E ring stencilled on its floor and modern adapters. Planted at most of the usual loci are the usual pieces for driving a Dehlavi lightning machine. The remaining pieces appear to have been abandoned in corners.

At the centre of the room are two empty hospital beds. They are aligned with two of the arms of the lightning Y which would be produced if the machine were active. There are medical monitoring machines-- additional consulting experts will be required to identify them, since neither mage is a medic. There are drips. Nutrients?

There are police investigators scattered around the room. Most of them look up expectantly as Devi and Natalie arrive.

Henders explains, "This is what they were tearing down. They seemed to be in a hurry. Look but don't touch."

"Who are 'they'?" Devi asks.

"The site staff. They're being questioned right now."

"Can we talk to them?" Natalie asks.

"No."

"How many people were here?" Devi asks. "It's the middle of the night. How many of them looked like scientists?"

Henders looks over at the ranking investigator in the room. "I don't have the whole list yet," the second man reports, "but seven people were in this room when we got here. Two in medical scrubs, five in casuals."

Devi says to Natalie, "To run a machine like this indefinitely, in shifts, allowing down time for a basic rate of mana recovery, and assuming fit mages--"

"Twenty-four to twenty-eight people, depending on their combined wattage," Natalie replies. The computation is trivial.

"This is a sleep science experiment," Devi announces. "You ever play Tetris for enough hours in one day that you end up dreaming in falling blocks? You ever study another language so hard that you end up dreaming in it? Mages have a similar thing, a specific trance state. We don't know a lot about it yet. With the right medical support, you could leave someone in that state for weeks. It looks like that's what they were doing."

"What about the patients?" Natalie demands. "What happened to the people in these beds?"

The second man, the investigator, shrugs. "They were empty when we got here. We're looking the rest of the site over now. You want us to bring a dog in?"

"Scanner," Natalie says to Devi, surgeon-style.

"Thelet eset oerin," Devi answers, throwing her a decorated black iron ring, as big as a coaster. Natalie puts it to one eye and scans the figurative horizon. She sees familiar and unfamiliar magical equipment, most of it dormant. The telescope, obviously, and other machines, built in flexible layouts for experimentation. A funfair after hours.

If you know the conditions, you can repeat the same accident over and over, Natalie thinks. Why couldn't this whole place be staffed by Ra?

But then, why?

What does Laura have that Ra wants? What does she have access to that nobody else does?

At yet another end of the complex, locked in a windowless temperature-controlled storage room, is a brighter, fuzzier signal, clustered.

*

This Ra hears the voices on the other side of the door. The door is an almost-solid steel slab. It would be time-consuming to crack open, at least for the baseline police. But they have mages now, and he can hear their coded chatter. A familiar pair of Names.

This Ra resigns himself, because the deal is done. The launch is complete and the human weapons are away; there is more than one way to get into T-world, and there is more than one way to exit from its far end.

The storage room is cramped. Racks of shelves of chemical bottles line two walls, leaving a narrow chasm with just enough room for one of Ra and two bath-sized, thick-walled, blue PTFE tubs. Both tubs are too heavy when full for one man to move, and therefore had to be filled on the spot, one and then the other on top, hurriedly and clumsily. This Ra has spilled some of the hydrofluoric acid on himself, and will start to feel the burning and see the skin bubbling on his fingers very soon, but... The missiles are away and running, and in an ideal scenario this will be over in another day. If Laura Ferno is successful, she won't need a corporeal body to return to.

And in any case, there will always be more of him.

The wonderful thing about a bath of HF is that it'll take care of a mage and her tools at the same time. Precisely machined tools will stay in working condition for minutes or hours, but as time passes and acid dissolves the edges, they become less effective, and soon are damaged unrecoverably. The signal that Natalie Ferno and Anil Devi are tracking, which leads into the lower of the two baths, is clouding and smearing out, even as they brainstorm frantically on the other side of the door.

One of them pounds desperately on the door. "What have you done?" Natalie shouts. "I know you're in there! What have you done to my sister?"

Ra steps over to the door. "What we've done doesn't matter, Natalie," he says, peacefully.

"You've killed her," Natalie screams. "How can that not matter?"

"Because we're trying to end death," Ra tells her. "Don't you remember what I told you on that mountain? This is about freedom.

"We're trying to save the world."

 

Next: Scrap Brain Zone

Discussion (54)

2013-10-05 15:21:35 by qntm:

Much gratitude to BaronWR for his biochemistry knowledge which I partially harvested for this chapter. This was an utter nightmare to write. I thought that Natalie Ferno (quick-thinking abstract theoretical physicist) and Anil Devi (quick-thinking magical engineer) would make an excellent team, but I had very serious problems any time they came to speak to one another. Devi is heavily bound by non-disclosure agreements in what he can say, and when he does speak he moves too fast for most people to keep up with his train of thought. Meanwhile, Natalie Ferno (who can keep up) makes a habit and a life skill out of never revealing information that she doesn't need to reveal, never saying something when she can get away with saying nothing, and never, ever saying the words "I don't know". As a result, writing conversations between these two people is nightmarish because of the amount of out-of-band signalling that's going on. One word from either of them yields huge chains of deductions on the part of the other. They're practically telepathic. It was pretty horrible, and I had to deliberately scale back on these character attributes just to get things done. As I mentioned on Twitter, I also had a pretty serious problem with the police turning up. A lot of people complain about how time travel can completely break a story or fill it with plot holes - "Why don't they just go back in time and undo it all?" - but for my money the police are far worse at this. "Why don't the police get involved?" is a huge roadblock in the progression of a story, particularly if the central characters are nominally "good people" who would indeed summon the police as soon as it became appropriate. Now, suddenly, Natalie and Devi were being questioned for hours while the real action was happening off-screen. I couldn't think of a good way around it so I just used it to try to drive up some nervous tension.

2013-10-05 16:24:17 by Nick:

I think it worked. The police mysteriously showing up was hilarious but made complete sense, and knowing Natalie's thoughts while she was stuck with the police really made me wonder what terrible things might be going on at the same time.

2013-10-05 16:32:35 by David:

Wow. This is really shaping up into something wonderful. Please write faster!

2013-10-05 16:40:22 by qntm:

I recently crunched some numbers and it looks like I write roughly 100 words of Ra per day. The story is currently 82,636 words long.

2013-10-05 16:48:04 by betaveros:

Oh man, the suspense. I love your fiction! By the way: the paragraph starting with "Natalie shares what she's worked out so far" seems to have an unpaired double quote, as does the one five paragraphs after it.

2013-10-05 16:51:37 by qntm:

First one is fixed. The second one was deliberate (if there is a paragraph break in what a character is saying, you add a paragraph break and a new double quote at the start of the next paragraph) but I've changed it to be less confusing.

2013-10-05 17:07:58 by lightquake:

Small typo: "She's never fly with it." I had to double-take that bit near the end before I realized that the Ra had dissolved/was dissolving Laura, which is interesting because we last saw her at the end of There Is No Cabal getting shot by Exa. Wonder what happened in the meantime.

2013-10-05 18:57:24 by Toph:

lightquake: "She won't need a corporeal body to return to."

2013-10-05 19:58:12 by morkaischosen:

Not exactly mysterious that the police show up when a house just exploded...

2013-10-05 21:37:00 by Silhalnor:

This was a good read, the intense edge-of-my-seat kind of reading that I haven't seen to this degree since Thaumonuclear, though a couple others were close. (Not that a lot of chapters weren't equally good, they simply lacked the tension.) I also like that Natalie got to be the protagonist for an important chapter, even if there wasn't reason for her to talk much. All this makes me wonder why Ra isn't trying to blow up Iceland again and why he attempted to do so the first time. Does the Floor happen to be located at Iceland? Then of course there is why he has enlisted Laura's aid rather than simply leave or kill her. Does he want her mother and Laura is the best way to revive her? @Sam I think I spotted that double quote. I'm familiar with the rule so it's presence actually confused me for a few seconds. Then I just ignored it and moved on. I absolutely loved this piece of sarcasm: "They never place the call, but miraculously the police appear all by themselves." Funniest thing in the whole chapter to me.

2013-10-06 01:57:58 by KimikoMuffin:

"Protagonism," hmm? You know ... maybe I'm just cynical, but I really like it when a story goes out of its way to show that, for the purposes of police involvement (or even just the reactions of non-main-characters), nobody gets a free pass on anything just because "we're the good guys", Our Heroes need to deal with the real world just like everyone else. So definite props for that! I mean, this was very well-written for other reasons beyond that, this is just the particular accolade that was sticking out in my mind. That and the "miraculously, the police show up," of course.

2013-10-06 03:26:19 by Silhalnor:

Why did I totally forget the astronomy equipment by the end? What does *astronomy* have to do with Ra or Tanako's World or any of this? Or are they looking at mana produced within the Earth?

2013-10-06 06:57:46 by Bardav:

@Silhalnor The astronomy equipment is for looking down into the Earth to find the Wheel Group's HQ. @Sam "This Ra has spilled some of the hydrofluoric acid on himself, and will start to feel the burning and see the skin bubbling on his fingers very soon, but. The missiles are away and running..." There is a hanging "but" in the middle there.

2013-10-06 09:55:02 by MichaelSzegedy:

@Sam What did you need biochem knowledge for? I'm probably being blind but I just can't find it. The Tetris effect lasts for a limited amount of time. (For me, usually the first day or two of the activity, and then never again, no matter how much time passes when I don't do the activity.) If it's persistent for mages, then then that means that it's a different mental process. I don't think this is important, but I just want to mention it.

2013-10-06 11:12:39 by OtherSam:

How do you say 'Laughon'? Larf-on? Laff-on? Lawn? Logan??

2013-10-06 12:36:22 by qntm:

The biochemistry stuff was to make sure that the lab results from studying the monster (DNA, etc.) were plausible, and that hydrofluoric acid was still a good choice for dissolving bodies and metal. (Wikipedia's article on HF is curiously silent on the topic of corpse disposal.) "Laughon" is pronounced as in "law 'n' order".

2013-10-06 23:35:33 by Sean:

One more typo near the beginning: "[...] to be getting to the point [of?] the conversation so quickly."

2013-10-07 01:33:29 by qntm:

I've got to figure out a better way to collect typos.

2013-10-07 01:35:06 by qntm:

Silhalnor: remember, Natalie has collected preliminary data to suggest that magic doesn't happen in space.

2013-10-07 02:04:19 by Silhalnor:

Sam: last time I saw Natalie's data it was still insufficient to answer the question as to whether or not magic happens in space. Bardav's statement that it is a search for the Wheel Group (which I really should have thought of to begin with) does make the most sense though.

2013-10-07 04:06:16 by Dan:

Great segment. I am probably hideously off-mark with these theories, but the biggest question point for me in this entry is with direct regard to what that bomb was and where it came from. The following is pure speculation. From the level of apparent complexity in its description, I am imagining it to be of the same approximate level of technology as several of the other more interesting artifacts we've encountered thus far -- the universal doctor and, more critically, Abstract Weapon. We also never got any sort of answer as to who the Boy running Weapon was or how the heck he figured out what it was, how to use it, etc. Still more critically, in the course of the Abstract Weapon story, there was *no direct confirmation that Wheel recovered Weapon*. It was implied, sure, but never specifically mentioned or confirmed. This is compounded by the Gauntlet that Ra brought with him when Laura pulled him from T-World, which managed to instantiate itself from a bare minimum of real matter. From this, I'm drawing two conclusions: 1) The Boy was one of the Ra manifestations. How the kid managed to get possessed in the first place is beyond me, but it provides a fairly neat explanation for the creative uses he came up with for Weapon and why he would specifically call out the Wheel Group. As one of the Wheel members stated, the odds of the kid having the self control to hold off using Weapon long enough to be told of its higher order functions is extremely low. As such, it's much more likely the kid was someone with sufficient incoming knowledge to ask the right questions to short circuit that process. 2) *Ra still has Abstract Weapon*, or at least the ability to instantiate it. Or, I could be overthinking this. Thanks for writing stories that'll do that to a guy, Sam!

2013-10-07 05:53:05 by jvz:

I find it interesting that this entity known as Ra shares a name with a bit of fantasy stuff from the '70s known as the "Ra Material", where Ra was some evolved societal complex (some sort of merging of people) that revealed information to certain people regarding the true physics of the universe and such. It's actually the basis for a bit of New Age crap if I'm not mistaken, so I find it a pretty funny coincidence with this story.

2013-10-07 09:24:04 by jonas:

Dan: I disagree. The bomb isn't complex, it's just very difficult to invent. It's definitely not anything as complicated as the abstract doctor. Look at the sentence about "blueprints".

2013-10-07 09:59:37 by qntm:

So Dan, let me ask you this: who else in the story do you think could be a manifestation of Ra?

2013-10-07 15:15:23 by M:

Hydrofluoric acid wouldn't be suitable for dissolving corpses; it's considered a weak acid because the Hydrogen and Fluoride atoms bond together very strongly. It's mainly dangerous because it can permeate through skin into the bloodstream. Hydrochloric acid would be more appropriate for corpse disposal. I think it's notable that Laura and Nick's bodies were being dissolved in acid instead of being killed through more conventional methods. Maybe it's to stop Exa and co. from resurrecting them to bring them back from T-world?

2013-10-07 17:42:01 by Eldritch:

Who else could be Ra? Well, Rachael Ferno, obviously. The only OTHER agent in the story who just suddenly seemed to be "someone else" , had extremely anomalous magical expertise and energy avaliability, and had a mysterious plan involving Tanako's world.

2013-10-07 18:35:16 by KimikoMuffin:

M: My assessment of Exa and co. has always been that their first option is to murder everyone in sight, and rarely if ever will they even seriously consider the possibility of resurrecting someone, even if that someone is an innocent who got caught in the crossfire. Laura is arguably even less of an "innocent" than Hatt or even The Boy (the Wheel Group didn't seem to put much thought into the possibility that he was anything more than a random angry kid who stumbled upon Abstract Weapon and more or less got manipulated into using it). I'm pretty sure Ra wants to prevent Laura from coming back into her *own* body, most likely so that she'll have to develop her bring-stuff-back-from-T-world prowess. The obvious reason for *that* would be that Ra wants to exploit this ability for his own gain.

2013-10-07 22:10:56 by Matt:

Another two characters who have been explicitly mentioned as acting different to normal - Scin and Martin Garrett (the latter using his own death to further his goals). Also both members of the Wheel Group - I wonder if they visit T-World in their dreams like 'regular' mages. Scin's job of trawling through the akashic records could theoretically put him at risk of hijacking, which raises the question of how much the Wheel Group know about how exactly Ra works. Being an omnipotent Deep Wizard is probably a hindrance to good security - if you can effortlessly vaporise all visible threats, its harder to notice the invisible ones.

2013-10-08 04:25:12 by MichaelSzegedy:

@M: Sulfuric acid is also acceptable. I think the idea of dissolving the corpses was a plain, so-nobody-finds-the-bodies deal: wouldn't it kind of be inconvenient if the police discovered Laura's body? By the way, they used hydrofluoric acid in Breaking Bad; the show is supposed to be realistic in the chemistry aspect. Unfortunately acids are a little outside my profession (biomedical engineer) so I can't say for sure. I was under the impression that all hydrohalic acids make strong acids.

2013-10-08 06:44:46 by M:

@KimikoMuffin: To clarify, I meant that if the Wheel Group wanted to get Ra out of T-World to thwart whatever his plan is, Exa could resurrect Ra and Laura, wake them up (thus getting them out of T-World), then kill them again. Dissolving the bodies would presumably make that more difficult.

2013-10-08 17:01:28 by Bauglir:

Dan: Re: Abstract Weapon, it only recently occurred to me that the Wheel Group probably did successfully destroy it back when Exa found it. Ra has demonstrated the ability to reproduce them from recordings, so I wouldn't be surprised if that's where the one we saw in the story came from (although Ra may be unable to reproduce it again because of the charm that erased it from the Records). I'm not sure if Ra was controlling the boy or not - the reasoning presented in the aftermath, "'Revenge on the world?' says Abstract Weapon. 'Oh. The men you want are the Wheel Group.'" actually seems plausible. Interesting in that, if that was a reproduction, the Wheel Group doesn't seem aware that they're possible.

2013-10-09 22:15:59 by Dan:

Sam, etc.: Who else could be Ra? You. You're quickly being revealed to be sufficiently devious, since now I need to reread the entire series. =) As was mentioned, Rachel Ferno is another obvious choice for her sudden and unreasonable ludicrous magical knowledge, although, frankly, her being a Wheel operative seems equally likely. One of the major question marks for me in identifying other avatars/hosts of Ra (for lack of a better term) is in separating out answers to a few specific questions: 1) Does Ra = Tanako, or is this an Alex Mercer situation and Tanako is just the first victim/mouthpiece? 2) How patient is Ra? 3) What does Ra want? Regarding the first: Despite the presumable advantages of being an ageless, sleepless spectre of T-World, I have somewhat of a difficult time believing that Tanako (as a fairly normal human) could have happened into the level of magical knowledge he appears to possess purely through his own devices during the intervening years. This implies that either he found something significant that advanced his own knowledge by a considerable factor, or that he is not really a fairly normal human. In turn, this implies some sort of outside agent is controlling/supporting him. Regarding the second: So far we have only seen confirmed Ra instances in a flurry of action. When did Benj Clarke get possessed relative to when he attempted to detonate Iceland? How about the Boy in Weapon? If the answers are "five minutes before the event," then we haven't seen Ra ever be patient enough to suggest that some of the minor things done by others are his doing. If the answers are "years prior," then a few additional names go on the potential list, chiefly Hatt. Regarding the third: Who knows yet? Perhaps I'm being dense, but I haven't seen much to suggest an overall goal for Ra yet. Given Sam's rather leading tone, I get the distinct feeling that this is wrong and I totally have seen suggestions, but lacking an overall picture I haven't recognized them yet. Bauglir: The only reason I'm mentally rejecting the Boy != Ra-controlled explanation is specifically due to that question: "Revenge on the world?" More accurately, it's the "world" part of the question. I honestly don't think anyone in the history of humanity has ever wanted revenge on "the world" for the simple reason that it sounds silly no matter how crazy you are. Revenge on "the people who did X," sure, that's normal, but I'm also assuming (for no real reason) that Weapon is answering questions posed to it truthfully. Given that (and my incomplete understanding of the state of the reality of the world), I'm guessing that asking the right question to get "The Wheel Group" as an answer is really unlikely. Depends how widespread and direct their influences are, really.

2013-10-10 16:27:46 by ducken:

this story is killing me. Sam, I appreciate the time it takes to write these pieces - the inter-connectivity and character development require a level of commitment a lot of writers lack - but, while reading a story you like, have you ever experienced impatience with yourself for not being able to read faster, then sadness as you realize that you're going to have to wait a while for the next portion? I have that in spades right now. seems to me you have a little "once upon a time in the west" thing going in your writing, where you slowly reveal to the audience that every character is corruptible, in the sense that everyone has something they value more than the generally accepted notion of "good" we like to trade on. the characters are RELATABLE, even though they're not "good." seeing motivation is important. as a terrible writer and an idiot, I apologize in advance for presuming to criticize you. however, I feel like you have "joss whedon syndrome." this is my term for when an author's characters end up talking like mini versions of that author at peak cleverness, losing their differentiation a little bit. this does not, of course, mean that the writing is bad, boring, or unbelievable; it just means that once in a while I lose track of character. regardless, love the story. edge of my seat, spikes my brain activity, makes me think of the structure of real life... yeah.

2013-10-10 17:34:12 by qntm:

Although this particular chapter focuses on two characters who are similar, ridiculously intelligent quick thinkers, your point about differentiating between characters is totally correct and it's something I've struggled with for a long time. I find it extremely hard to think/write in voices other than my own. If you go back to my earlier stuff you'll find I was much worse at this (the Ed stories in particular) but I'm still not all the way there yet. I am deeply envious of Chris Onstad's work on Achewood, for example. I'm going to keep working on it, but until then I hope the action and the science fiction can make up the shortfall. Thanks for your kind comments.

2013-10-10 22:12:19 by Eldritch:

Dan: Benj got possessed back during that chapter when Tanako's World is first introduced - Laura couldn't find Benj, so she just imagined up a new Benj and brought him back - or rather, brought back Ra with Benj's memories. Reread the relevant chapters; this is pretty obvious. Sam: One more observation on the story - Every time a new chapter comes up, there's a feeling of disorientation ; it's as though every single chapter was the beginning of a story starting In Medias Res. They all feel slightly disconnected, as though we were reading every other chapter of a story, skipping the even-numbered ones. This doesn't render the story unreadable - it's an excellent way to avoid exposition dumps, which plagued Fine Structure - and I enjoy the story very much. But it doesn't really feel like a novel, or even a serial story; more like a collection of closely-interrelated vignettes tied together with common characters and an overarching plot. (Maybe this is what you're going for?) This wasn't the case so much in the earlier chapters, because often they actually had some kind of transition or else occurred directly after the previous chapter. I don't really want you to write more intermediary chapters - the lack of exposition and the mental puzzle of fitting the chapters together is quite refreshing, and having you write MORE chapters that don't contain the absolute maximum of non-inferable information would slow down the update pace even further - but some kind of transition would be nice. It would have been nice, for instance, to know how Natalie suddenly knows all of this about Ra (I assume Laura told her, and that SHE found all this out off-screen), because as it is the impression I get is "Did I miss a chapter?" Stuff we had been speculating about for months is, with little fanfare, suddenly rattled off by a character who was in the background for the past few months and who we had no reason to believe knew all of this stuff. A sntnc s stll rdble f y rmv ll th vwls, and you can still fill in a picture mentally if you replace half the pixels with #000000 , but if a piece of conventional fiction is what you're going for, it's not really the most fluid read. Although again, if you're actually TRYING for the collection - of - vignettes story model, you're doing a great job and it's proving VERY interesting. Keep up the good work!

2013-10-11 00:39:46 by qntm:

Natalie knew a great deal about Ra already from the events of "Ragdoll Physicist" and the two following chapters, and learned more from Laura during "Daemons". There's only really one new fact in this chapter, which is that there are multiple coexisting instances of Ra all working together. You learned this fact at the same time that Natalie did, with Ra's line, "Like I care. Like I'm singular!" Natalie deduces the rest on the spot. If this still seems improbable, I guess I'm not good at judging the relative difficulty of a puzzle. Information flows into Natalie Ferno and doesn't come out. She's been watching these events unfold for some time, and has been pursuing studies of her own. She knows a great deal more than she's letting on.

2013-10-11 01:13:08 by qntm:

Believe it or not, the amount of exposition has been going up recently. "Abstract Weapon"/"Death Surrounds This Machine"/"Zero Day" was originally supposed to be one chapter, but grew in the telling. "ॐ"/"Bare Metal"/"Hatt's People" was going to be a single chapter explaining how Ed Hatt got his ring, in a few scenes from his life. "Deeper Magic" and "There Is No Cabal" were originally one chapter which I split in two because it wasn't working.

2013-10-12 01:34:06 by Yasha:

I'm still way confused/intrigued by the mention of Ra as important in 1986 (Bare Metal) by Martin Garrett, and Tanako's death _afterwards_ in the 90s. I.e. the Wheel Group is worried about "waking" ra even before Tanako dies. Did Tanako just take the name "ra" by accident, granting him all of the associated superpowers when he died? Also, I find it interesting that Laura didn't use the opportunity presented by the akashic records in There Is No Cabal to say hi to her mom and ask her about everything. But I suppose she was just following Tanako around, except for the part where he needed her to find the shortcut from her memory palace to the akashic records.

2013-10-12 16:09:02 by naura:

Yasha: good point. I think Ra is something more than just Tanako, something larger that subsumed him. I remember something about Ra being the origin in the phase space of True Names, Ra as a "fundamental magical constant", geological mana being owned by Ra. Somewhere deep down in the earth there is a shitload of mana, Ra owns it, Ra is multiple (multiplex? multiplicious? manifold?). I can't help but suspect there's some time weirdness going on here. By which I mean, either time travel or this being a rewritten history after another one elapsed (in which the Wheel Group won but then had to restore Earth [or at least its crust] from the akashic records). Care to comment, Sam? Throughout all this, I can't help but feel bad for the real Nick Laughon, who has presumably been trapped in T-world, desperately searching for Laura or hiding away from the monsters.

2013-10-12 16:20:55 by naura:

I feel like Ra's unwillingness to name the recursion artifact stems from the Wheel group have some kind of locator/trigger on the notion of Abstracts. This is suggested by the beginning of The Jesus Machine, in which Grey is speculating on the uncanny timing of Exa's arrival, which seems to have been triggered by his conceptualizing the machine as Abstract Doctor. Some of the abstracts "washed up from space"? That's... deeply interesting. How did they get there? When? Is there really no magic in space? Magic seems to be a technological artifact, a system at least administered by the Wheel Group, if not created. But this: "It is as if the table was being held in some higher reality, separated from this one by a thin silk cloth, and then the cloth was ripped out from under it. Click goes the final tumbler in Laura's head." sends my thoughts in some other direction entirely. Coupled with Laura and Tanako's conversation near the end of There Is No Cabal, I suspect magic isn't the leak, it's the distraction. The Wheel Group set up magic with all these rules, magic as engineering, to keep people from discovering deep magic. Why does Tanako suggest this should be called maya ["illusion"]?

2013-10-13 14:11:00 by quintopia:

How is Laughon pronounced?

2013-10-15 01:48:01 by MichaelSzegedy:

Answered further up. Law'n, as in "law'n'order".

2013-10-15 01:54:11 by MichaelSzegedy:

@naura Well, if it's a leak, then it looks to me like it's a controlled leak. They were clinking their glasses over it and everything. If it's a distraction, what's it a distraction from? It might make a little sense as a distraction from the Abstract artifacts, since people who do know how "magic" works might have more trouble reverse-engineering the artifacts than people who don't, if they are mislead as to the principles on which they work. But that sounds like a very long shot, and magic doesn't necessarily even look like it's misleading. A total cover-up might still have been easier.

2013-10-16 17:58:12 by Mike:

First of all, a technical clarification. Apparently, the acidity of hydrofluoric acid is by no means linear with respect to its concentration in solution. Dilute HF is indeed a weak acid, but pure HF is comparable in strength to pure sulfuric acid. For this purpose, sufficiently pure hydrofluoric acid is ideal because it seeps through skin and permeates flesh with distressing speed. Second of all, I did have a nagging suspicion that 'Tanako' wasn't entirely on the level, but now it definitely seems to me that naura is correct, and Ra somehow subsumed Tanako as a result of his having died inside the akashic records. It can't be as simple as 'Kazuya Tanako dies in the right place with the right True Name, wins the superpower lottery.' My mind still isn't made up about Rachel Ferno, though. Finally, I think the phrase "if a piece of conventional fiction is what you're going for" is the crux of that whole discussion. 'Conventional fiction' with a single plot following a single protagonist is all well and good, but that's certainly not all there is to fiction. Any disorientation between chapters just underscores the theme that Natalie explicitly outlines when she tries to put the brakes on Laura's protagonist-dream-quest investigation. Realistically, any series of events with big consequences is going to entail a lot of confusion, a lot of outright lies, and a lot of people working at cross purposes and not entirely trusting one another. And all this makes for a great story, conventionality be damned.

2013-10-18 17:27:23 by Mike:

Okay, I think I've got a decent handle on what Ra!Tanako was implying at the end of There Is No Cabal. He stated that the Wheel Group meters out mana usage, and the human-accessible rules of magic aren't an inadvertent leak or the only part they couldn't hush up. As we've now explicitly been shown, Ra is manipulating Laura, but those statements are fairly consistent with the Wheel Group's actions thus far. (For example, Abstract Doctor is a ring with carved symbols; mind-boggling complexity is the only difference between that ring and one manufactured by, say, the Hatt Group or some other industrial magic firm.) I think the availability of mana is at the center of the Wheel Group's artifice; after all, it appears that Abstract Doctor and Abstract Weapon and Wheel Group medical karas are not drawing mana directly from their users, and Abstract Weapon is capable of going toe-to-toe with Exa in terms of raw power. The Iceland interlude showed that a whole lot of mana exists which cannot be tapped by humans. I'm guessing that the Wheel Group assigned geological mana a True Name that cannot be held by any human, and limited humans to accessing only their own biological mana. It's been claimed that only a human mind can channel magic, so my best guess here would be that the geological mana had to be assigned to something resembling a human mind to make sure that the assignment would stick. (Tangentially, I'm interested to see what, if anything, the Wheel Group will do to lock out the aliasing technique that Laura used on Hatt's Montauk bilge. After all, they did quickly disallow whatever technique it was that drove Mitra and Devi's infinite mana experiment.)

2013-10-20 08:15:25 by MichaelSzegedy:

Mike, massive amounts of mana doesn't look like the only advantage they have. Their magic is incalculably advanced, and the amount of energy in Iceland that was stored underground was barely enough to make a bowling ball. Laura didn't get her mana geologically, and she made a lot more mass than that. It looks more like they can pull anything they can think of out of Tanako's World, if I had to guess. It's like Ender at the end of Xenocide.

2013-10-20 19:08:57 by Mike:

Michael, I was originally thinking that their technology is advanced precisely because they have access to much greater quantities of mana. If humans were capable of excreting a few cubic centimeters of gasoline per day and couldn't get it from any other source, we could never build a gasoline-based automotive industry because the energy source isn't plentiful enough. Still, I have no explanation for how their technology had time to get so advanced if they didn't "[get] there decades before anyone else...if not centuries." The real question is how Ra!Tanako's statements are supposed to mesh with this line from Abstract Weapon: "Back when they won, and there was enough raw magic saturating the world for it to be a safer plan to burn it off on something wasteful and elaborate than to archive it for future generations, the Floor was built as a physical space." I'm guessing that "Back when they won" COULD be referring the event they're celebrating above New York City in 1969, but there's also Exa's exchange with other Group members: "I remember that we cleared this world out. We won. Is a future coming in which we will, eventually, truly, have won?" For a minute there I thought I had a solid idea, but every answer raises more questions. (And thus, I can't wait to read more.)

2013-10-27 04:59:46 by john:

"Ra is multiple (multiplex? multiplicious? manifold?)." I think the term you're looking for is 'legion.'

2014-02-13 21:11:31 by Mike:

"'I need something that can read people's True Names remotely.' Devi opens his mouth to respond to this, then closes it, and smiles. He has no idea how to do this. It is an old sensation, and a familiar one, and an exciting one." Personally, the excitement kicks in for me once I've got a tentative plan of attack; an incomprehensible engineering problem is actually a bit worrying at first glance. But you've really nailed your description of the engineer mentality.

2015-09-24 05:06:36 by jstanley:

"Spiky black hair, the kind of face which seems to be perpetually grinning regardless of mood." Is this describing Natalie or Anil?

2018-06-22 11:44:54 by gasdive:

I've come to the party late, and am enjoying it very much. "There is no conservation law for information." Was quite jarring. In this universe there very very very much is a law of conservation of information.

2019-01-04 00:09:00 by tahrey:

>Bath size acid-resistant plastic tubs >Hydrofluoric acid >Don't need a corporeal body to return to Triggered my "oh HELL no" button quite hard here even before Ra made things completely plain :-o Shame about all the magical bangles though, those would have been quite useful to hang on to even if she wasn't going to use them. Why destroy such artefacts? Tch. Incidentally, mass-energy IS information, so it's completely covered by the laws of conservation. It's why there's a pretty hard upper limit on how much data you can fit into a certain radio bandwidth - multiplied by the transmitter power and divided by the transmission distance - and why it's getting ever harder to increase the speed of computer processors and increase the density of storage media. It's all subject to Information Tax. In all those cases you're having to rapidly change the state of your vector, and each of those changes, same as building a body from repurposed air molecules, or overwriting the engrams of a brain (or as slightly more modern science would likely say, refactoring its connectome... which is a far more physical thing), requires a certain quanta of energy. Though the amount of energy required to convert existing matter into a different form (rather than outright creating/destroying it) or to fully rewrite an entire mind is probably not actually all that much in mass terms, thanks to E=MC^2. Probably only a couple of grammes, maybe far, far less...

2019-01-04 00:19:27 by tahrey:

And just to clarify paragraph one: HF is *extremely* nasty stuff, even compared to pure sulphuric or nitric acid or even aqua regia (ie a mixture of the two). Even when dilute, you don't want to get it anywhere near you, and pure HF is essentially a watchword for "keep the hell away, and if someone somehow falls into a vat of it, don't even think about trying to rescue them". The fluorine component means that once it hits your skin and soaks through into your bloodstream, then finds its way to your bones, it will be taken up by them and eat them away from the inside. Field treatment for a spill onto bare skin at the end of a limb is a tight tourniquet at the top of the limb and just above the site, enough to completely restrict circulation, and then hit the patient with enough anaesthetic or alcohol so that they're out cold when the paramedic turns up and says "we'll have to amputate immediately to stop it spreading into the rest of their body". The fun thing is, in older cars, it used to form naturally in the cable insulation and particularly the starter motor windings if there was a fire, or any sparking/high heat that created similar conditions, because of a CFC-like (and ironically, intended to be flame retardant) component of the plastic. You were recommended to only handle such parts with thick acid-resistant gloves and to never risk getting any of the gunk on you, preferring scrapping of whole components (presumably with tongs) or the entire vehicle to farting around trying to repair fire or arcing damage, because the outcomes included loss of limbs and death. Though it's possible my older Haynes manuals were laying it on a bit thick, the COSHH sheets I read during biochemistry modules at uni and during idle moments in a stint as a school science tech weren't much less hysterical about it. It will burn through your flesh at quite some speed, and once it's done that there'll be nothing left of you, because it will have ALREADY melted your bones.

2019-01-04 00:23:46 by tahrey:

Incidentally you mention the Ed stories in the comments above as if they're a bad thing. Of course it's good to have greater range as a writer, but at least in the case of those, having the same kind of slightly mad scientist voice throughout was useful consistency as it focussed mainly on the two characters who were like that anyway, and they were just plain enjoyable reads regardless.

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