I eased in to classes, sitting in for a few and then gradually taking over the teaching from Ms. Law (who'd taken over Junior Math, but preferred to focus on her Physical Conditioning classes) and Mrs. Barrow, who taught 'Upper Math' and Symbolwork but had been roped into Semiotics, which was what they taught the Junior girls to prepare them for real symbology. Incidentally, I had my semi-sister Amanda for both math and semiotics, which she was ecstatic about. Not so much because I was her sister as because I knew she wasn't really twelve and wouldn't be suspicious of her being head above the rest of the class. Though, to be fair, some of the other girls were very advanced for their age (I assumed they looked their actual ages - but this was not a given at St. Circe's, as Amanda or I could attest), so Amanda's very advanced placement wasn't as obvious as it might have been.
Soon, I was teaching four classes a day and spending a good four or five hours a day outside of class preparing lessons, curriculum, and materials. I'd been excited about spending more time at St. Circe's and with my friends but, truth be told, I didn't have much time for socializing.
In some ways, it was like being a student again. Even though I was contractually a teacher, Ms. Azucar let me practice with the gymnastics club, where I quickly found myself back at the middle of the pack skill-wise, and the school had a Yoga & Pilates club that I also joined to round out my fitness regimen. Teachers could partake - most of them just had better things to do than sweating with a bunch of peppy teenagers. And in my spare time, when I wasn't teaching classes, exercising, or cuddling (or doing more physically-exerting things) with Cassie, I was with Simone, deep in study and working on our seeker's stone. I basically went back to Lily's to sleep and access her library and the rest of the time I spent at St. Circe's. I even showered there - because that's where I did gymnastics and yoga, I insisted, and not because of far more-obvious, far more-Cassie-related reasons.
"It would be nice if there was a book that just told us how to make a seeker's stone," Simone sighed. We were seated in the little leather chairs in the secret 'advanced witchcraft' library, every library volume vaguely pertaining to artifices splayed out around us, as well as our forbidden book on The Lesser & Intermediate Artifices (which was actually reasonably advanced). It was half an hour until her curfew in the Advanced dormitory and, though I could write her an excuse form to keep her out longer, it seemed unwise to burn administrative capital so early into my tenure.
"Seeker's stones are, apparently, forbidden knowledge," I shrugged. "So we've got to reconstruct it from scraps and clues."
Simone played with her hair, distracted in thought. In the past two months, she'd ditched her braids, which she'd had since she was about eight, in favor of a halo of coiled curls that faded from black to golden brown at the tips. She knew at least as many hair spells as I did, though, and switched things up every few days. And when she 'played' with her hair, that usually meant she magicked it around like a living creature, the dense mass rising up into poofs or curling into little coiled braids in all sorts of complex patterns as she thought. She dropped the book she'd been flipping through, her hair half-afro and half-braids. "We don't!"
"We don't what?"
"You said: we've got to reconstruct the seeker's stone from scraps and clues. Well… yeah, if you want to copy an old design piece for piece. But why would we do that? Since it's obvious there's no shortcut for making the stone, why bother looking for one? Let's just invent the damn thing on our own, and who gives a crap if it's different from a 'real' stone?"
"That's brilliant!" I laughed. I grabbed Simone and kissed her cheek. "It's a project, not a puzzle."
Now… the witches and warlocks who'd come up with the powerful artifices now forbidden to us had been a brilliant bunch… but Simone and I were pretty damn smart, too. If they could figure it out from scratch, the two of us could certainly figure it out with the benefit of modern scholarship. We'd already discovered a secret symbol not found elsewhere - one that was involved, at least, in a traditional seeker's stone. Maybe we'd discover more along the way, unlocking the broader lexicon of witchcraft beyond the walled garden we'd been stuck with.
Despite my original intention, I ended up burning a bit of my administrative capital that night - I returned Simone to the dormitory two hours after curfew. Ms. Irons glowered at us as I handed her Simone's permission slip, but I couldn't care less: in two and a half hours, Simone and I had drafted a working (we hoped) seeker's stone! There was one caveat - we'd need to discover two additional symbols for it to work. And, in the off-chance that those symbols didn't even exist, we'd just have to trial-and-error our way through them as well, iteration after iteration through the permutations of market… magical energy, rather…
"Holy shit!" I whispered. I was about two seconds away from sending Lily a sympathetically-linked message to request transport back to her place when my epiphany struck. I dashed back to the Advanced dormitory, unlocked the door (I was staff now, so no problem there), and dashed past Ms. Irons.
"Miss Bryce! This is unacceptable behavior!" the night matron called after me.
I rattled at Simone's doorknob. "Simone! Simone! Simooooone!" I hissed. "I figured it out."
Simone opened the door and popped her head out. She'd already changed into her pajamas. "Figured what out?"
"It! Everything!" That was perhaps overstating things.
"Miss Bryce, it's going to have to wait until morning," Ms. Irons said, tugging at my shoulder. "It's well past curfew and…"
"Shh!" I said. "This is important. Like… really important," I said. I shot her as serious a look as I could manage - an ear-to-ear grin wanted to pull itself across my face. "Like… Nobel Prize of witches important."
"The Golden Cloak," Ms. Irons said.
"There's a Nobel Prize for witchcraft?" Simone said.
"The Golden Cloak," Ms. Irons repeated. "Every three years…"
I put my hand upon the night matron's shoulder and managed another serious look. "I'll thank you in my speech. Um… also, I'm getting Cassie, too."
We rounded Cassie up - she was still awake, fortunately - and the three of us trekked off to the nearest ley to arrange transport to Lily's. Cassie was the only one of us with a working ring - at the moment - but, mostly, I figured she'd want to participate in making history. And, as we marched through the crisp autumn night, I described my plan to them.
During my two weeks back at Vobis Financial, I'd plunged deep into some pretty esoteric math and complex programming. Even though I'd had no explicit memory of my time at St. Circe's then, part of my subconscious was clearly churning away at some very important problems in magic. I'd sometimes go into fugue-like states and come out, having scribbled out some counterintuitive mathematical proof or bit of strange-but-functional computer programming and, more often than not, I could come up with some finance-based application for what I'd just done. During that time, they'd gone from calling me 'boy genius' which is what they'd called me since shortly after I started at Vobis, to 'the warlock', which I liked a lot more. Incidentally, it was also far more appropriate. They'd just got the gender wrong.
One of the things I'd been working on was something called 'adversarial neural networks' - using particular arrangements of neural-network modules to 'fight' one another to come up with the best solutions to high-dimensional 'market space'… basically, the past, current, and future states of certain financial markets across a matrix of hypotheticals. Well… that's what I'd used it for then. Really, it was built for figuring out witching symbols.
"That makes zero sense," Cassie said. "How can a computer come up with magical symbols? It can't just reach into the ether or whatever and - bam! - magical symbol."
"Correct," I said. "But that's not what this does. I assume both of you know about patterned pulses - the kiddie way of teaching symbology?"
"Yeah, but only hedge witches use those," Simone said. "They're only a rough approximation of the flat-state of the symbols. A real witch uses real symbols."
"They're only rough and flat because our brains can't recalculate pattern rates at a hundred times a second. But a computer can. What we do is feed a bunch of pattern variants of each of the symbols in - varying rotation, color, aperture, and so on - and then the computer trains itself up against competing sets, and eventually it will be able to recreate an 'approximation' so close to the real symbol that no witch could ever make one so exact. And, here's the kicker…"
"Holy shit… oh my God! Holy shit, Natalie!" Simone jumped up and down - she got it.
"What?" Cassie said. "What?!"
Simone gesticulated wildly. "They don't even have to be symbols we know. If you feed in enough of the ones we know about, it'll generalize and spit out any valid symbol. Even ones we're not allowed to know about. Maybe even ones that haven't ever been discovered! Things no sane witch would come up with!"
We gathered around the Pentium 4 desktop in Lily's place - and gathered all the electronics we had access to - the desktop, a tablet (two years old and still in its box - who knows who'd thought to give it to Lily), an old smartphone, an older camcorder, and a bunch of age-yellowed cables, many of them older than I was. Fortunately, Simone and I both knew a bit about electronics and Cassie, who'd co-founded the robotics club at her old prep school, knew more than that. For obvious reasons, St. Circe's didn't have a robotics club. Unless you liked pointless solder burns and the smell of ozone, there wasn't any point in doing electronics at a magic school. But, in Lily's place, the area around the computer was about as close as you could get to a safe haven for robotics.
*Now's the nerd bit - for the non-nerdy, it's probably worth your while to skip over this part.*
I logged in to the Vobis server from the desktop, transferred my finance program to the tablet (it had the fastest processor of any of the items present), and got to work retooling it. Cassie set up a rig for digitizing pulsed patterning and Simone scribbled down as many useful patterns as possible. Since the patterns were a lot closer to an analog pattern than a digital one, we needed a way to get the patterns translated into a computer-comprehensible code. Simone devised an efficient algorithm to take a continuous pattern delivered over time and transform it into a discrete geometric surface that could represent as many symbol dimensions as you liked.
After two hours or so, we had a workable setup. Basically, we would turn a dial up and down in rhythm with the pulsed pattern, which would be input into a digital file at a thousand samples a second. This file was passed into an algorithm to transform the pattern into a surface, and that surface was then distributed to a reference set and random 'monte carlo' starting sets for my program to compare, evolve, and re-compare. We could specify a number of training iterations, and the more we ran, the better the output would be. In this case, the output was synthetic surfaces that were matched against a control set. Basically, we were looking for witching patterns that occasionally got patterns closely matching the control set despite being absent from the training algorithm, as this would mean the algorithm had generated a valid symbol from scratch. Once completed, I backed everything up onto every medium available, uploaded the module to the Vobis server, and ordered the program to run a million training sets.
*This is the end of the nerdy bit.*
Simone yawned - it was close to three in the morning. "How long is that going to take?"
"Probably a few hours," I said. "Let's get some shuteye."
+++++
That late at night, and with that much brainpower churning for that long, I slept like the dead. Even with Cassie's boob in my face and her hand resting along my flank, I felt not a twinge of arousal, only the deep satisfaction of a sleep well-deserved. Simone slept in the big guest room, its California king mattress wasted on a single occupant... but Simone certainly deserved her rest, too. I awoke at 7 am to the smell of coffee and the sound of Lily banging on my bedroom door.
"Natalie! Why am I getting messages that Simone and Cassie never came back last night?"
"Wha?" Was about the most intelligible I was capable of being in that moment. I tried to sit up, pushed Cassie off my hair, and then completed the act. I was just about out of bed when Lily lost her patience and unlocked the door, not even bothering to ask whether I was decent… but, I suppose, whatever might have been on display in my room, it would have been nothing Lily hadn't seen before.
"Honestly, Natalie?" Lily's thin eyebrows went up and down, alternating between anger and disappointment. "Because you're staff now doesn't mean you get to take students home for romantic excursions! I'm beginning to regret..."
Suddenly very awake, I surprised her a bit by huffing in anger and stamping right up to her. Hell, I surprised myself. "Headmistress Lily, I think I've earned a little benefit of the doubt. Cassie and Simone are here on school business, and we didn't finish until three this morning."
"Is it finished?" Simone called in from the hallway. She stumbled past Lily and into my room. "Hi, Headmistress Lily."
"Is what finished?" Lily demanded.
I shrugged. "Let's find out."
We proceeded out to the computer room, me in the lead and Cassie bringing up the rear, still very much in the process of waking up. Lily gasped when she saw what we'd done to the place - devices, screens, and recording devices all connected in a web of jury-rigged and mismatched cables all across her desk, empty boxes tossed by the wayside, old and almost-certainly-useless cables piled in the corner, and the little console window on the computer monitor reading: Processing Simulation 997275/1000000 and ticking up at about 70 runs a second as Vobis's cloud computer churned against the problem. Thirty seconds later, the command line returned:
Training Set Complete
V.>
"Okay, moment of truth," I said. I updated our various copies and backups of the program and then commanded it to 'render from training set'.
A little render window popped up, and a symbol shape resolved on it, scanning down in two dimensions and pausing for a moment, a white squiggle a bit like an octopus's silhouette rendered against a black background. Then the symbol started to change, shifting in shape, color, brightness, and thickness as it rotated through simulated dimensions. I watched it render for all of four glorious seconds before the window crashed and the console read:
V.> Connection to host lost!
"Wh-aah!" I shrieked. Because the monitor blinked off with a blue blip, acrid smoke streamed out from the computer, the tablet bricked itself, and the little circuit board that Cassie had repurposed for our dial sparked and blackened.
"Was that as impressive as I suspect it was?" Lily asked.
"More, I think," Simone said. "Have any of you ever seen that symbol before?"
"I haven't," Lily said. "And if I haven't… I very much doubt that any of you three have."
Immediately, we all started trying to trace the symbol. As I mentioned, it looked a bit like an octopus, albeit with four tentacles protruding from a bulbous mass rather than eight - that was fortunate, since it meant we could trace it out with one hand. Most symbols only require a finger or two, and two-handers are unheard of (or were - we've discovered quite a few since then). A good witch learns to appropriate her fingers, tracing out two, three, even four symbols at once, depending on what she's doing. And, so long as you keep track of which symbol is which, the magic knows what to do. In the current case, the quartopus symbol (*the discoverer of a symbol gets to name it - in this case, we decided by committee) was first traced correctly by Simone, but the rest of us, being witches of good talent, weren't far behind.
"First!" Simone shouted - and, indeed, she was. Upon finishing the pattern, some vaguely-realized magic pulsed through the air, coalescing into a little spinning eddy that rattled the discarded packing materials of recently-bricked electronics. It was soon joined by one… two… three other eddies from the rest of us, all of them coalescing into a palpable spiral of air that then whooshed down the hallway and threw the door to the guest bedroom ajar.
"What was that about?" I asked.
"Um…" Simone said. "Before the symbol worked, I was thinking about how I wished I'd had a better night's sleep so I could concentrate better."
I gasped. "Holy shit… do you guys realize what that symbol was?"
Lily nodded. "The cardinal."
The cardinal symbol. Our quartopus was a long-rumored but never-discovered symbol, the seeker's holy grail. A witch need only picture some person, place, or object with which she had a palpable connection and the cardinal would point the way. A bed you'd recently slept in, an estranged family member, or a ring you desperately wanted to find, you need but envision it and the cardinal would point your way. Forget a seeker's stone - we were going to build a quartocompus.
And we were going to build it after school - we all had work and/or class to attend.
I do not envy the poor sysadmin who has to deal with Vobis' fried server.
I'm also getting quite curious what Natalie's friends, family, and coworks from the normal world think of "Martin's" sudden disappearances.
We'll learn a bit about that in a few chapters!
And, yeah. Poor sysadmins. Magic and tech do not mix well.
I'm thinking the sysadmin deserves all they get. Open access to cloud servers using user/password instead of public keys?! No live alerting on odd behaviour (IP source, time of day, activity causing spike in payment for cloud resources)
Of course, if it's a true cloud, you have to wonder if a whole data-center didn't just go offline and cause outage for all the sites whose devs didn't invest in multi-zone...or would the magic go trawling through the wiring (as the data flowed to that desktop) and crash half the internet on the way - core routers and all.
On the other hand, this doesn't make sense. This process has been playing with the data the whole night. If drawing the symbol crashed the hardware, that should have been entirely localized to Lily's home. If handling the data caused issues, the cloud should have imploded when Natalie started the program, or maybe even when they were recording the pulses.
@LookingForKeys Smaller companies don't always have the time/resources to set up a properly configured monitoring system (even though it's not really that difficult to get something half decent). The most egregious mistake is not revoking "Martin's" credentials after he hasn't shown up to work for WEEKS.
@LookingForKeys @kabi-chan You have to grant that there's something magical and tech destroying about magic. The training sets that the computers used for the magical symbols were the same as the magical symbols in the way a tennis ball is topologically equivalent to a knife, but you won't cut your hand on it. But, as soon as you take that training set and try to render a new knife - look out! As for why Vobis doesn't have better security on their systems, that's an excellent question. You'll have to ask them - I'm guessing it's for the same reason that hacking is super realistic on movies/TV. Sorry!!!
@OvidLemma I wonder if magic is Turing complete? I mean, there's a symbol / symbol combo literally for logical negation of a magical effect, which is how the antipotion from way back when worked. All you need is either a logical AND or logical OR witching symbol, and with the wonders of NAND/NOR logic, you've got all you need to artifice up some magical transistors, and after that, you've got all you need to start making latches and then processors, and then full-fledged computers. Artifice computers sidestep the whole magic / tech divide by making the tech ??? ?? magic. Hopefully such artifices aren't as hopelessly bloated as Minecraft redstone though, physical size-wise. Have fun miniaturizing witching symbols. Perhaps a magical CNC machine? Can artifices draw out witching symbols automatically by themselves, or does it always need a witch? I'm sure somebody will prove them all wrong.
The other solution is to craft the magical equivalent of a Faraday cage, so you can do all the magical juking you want and the protected electronics are completely isolated from it all.
@0xFFF1 This is a good and interesting question... though I have to wonder whether Turing completeness or, for that matter, something like P vs NP, is applicable for something that might bend the laws of reality. I think that, at the very least, the local magic-space that witches engage in is Turing complete, which would simply mean that any magical effect that is castable in our reality can be cast with the system that they use, though other Turing-complete systems might be more or less efficient at arriving at the exact same effect. However, there may also be greater forms of magic that supercede the witch's magic and that alter reality in such a way that what is or isn't castable in a Turing-complete system changes - that is, the magical equivalent of 2 + 2 = 5 becomes true.
@OvidLemma Probably should have encoded the symbol to denature it
@LionHamster There are some growing pains in the infancy of techno-magic. I'm currently writing the third installment, in which workarounds have been found for many of the problems that make magic and technology appear incompatible.