Wooster Ashely was a low level-bureaucrat who couldn't remember the last time they had their clock speed lower than 2.55:1. Low-level, on paper anyway. In reality, if need be he could command a large section of the TGC military and all of the malware lying in wait seeded throughout Union space just in case. We're at 80 heavy patrol ships, another 20 being built. Seven medium patrol ships, another three being built. The light patrol ship... thank god I'm not in charge of coordinating that project. At the time in question, he was acting as the liaison between the Gordian knot of the bureaucracy of the TGC and the people actually doing something productive at PRD. Seventeen security checks later, he was able to enter the facility kept at warp 1.01 in the middle of nowhere and cut off from more or less all communications.

"Ah, Wooster, what news do you bring?" Amrish Ilyas, head of logistics for the facility, spoke up. "Any idea how the rumors spread so quickly?"

"Nope," Wooster sighed, "still no idea. It's only been six days since we found and accidentally shut down this place, for it to spread so quickly? We have no idea where the rumor started. A lot's happened in the last week."

"I'd guess it started at that university since it took only a day for them to figure out that mana has to be in motion relative to its container to stay contained."

"Mh. Sometimes that place is a godsend, most of the time it's a diplomatic nightmare. We're back to calling it mana then? Oh, the Azath can't summon mana."

"Yeah. Josh came up with some more official-sounding term, but it had no chance in hell of competing with mana. The Azath bit's been confirmed then? Another point for it having to do with carbon-based chemical reactions then, if the only known species to use silicon rather than carbon can't do it."

Tyrese Hindricks, the head researcher of the place (nominally anyway, expecting one person to be an expert above everyone else in their own specializations is a bit absurd), got bored of waiting to see how long it would take for Wooster to notice they were behind them. Thus he spoke. "And following such theme, we've come to call the general application of it to be magic and the specific use of it to be spells. Aaaaannnyywaayy," he crumpled up some paper from a notebook and tossed it down the corridor. A second later the ball of paper was incinerated. "We’re starting to get something of a grasp on how it works."

Wooster looked over the recording from his eyes of the event a few times before replying. "Interesting. How's it work?"

"Right so, this stuff does stuff when through various shapes. Pretty much it's a programming language for reality, or maybe an embedded language like how Lua is often used. So when you cast a spell you're forcing mana through specific shapes. Those tiny muscle clusters and whatnot that we genetically engineered away because they were just taking up space some years ago, in retrospect seem to have been designed to, or rather as designed as anything naturally evolved then become vestigial, what with this place being active for a long time, can be, form specifically shaped cavities."

Oh right, Wooster though, I forgot about this guy's love for walls of speech. It was times like these that Wooster rather hated the inventor of continuous-flow lungs.

"Oh, and did I mention that according to all our equipment mana isn't made of anything, no bosons, no quarks, no leptons, it's just kinda there, oh and without any mass? Ignoring the no mass part, the stuff just doesn't interact with gravity at all, though it does interact with electromagnetism; we sent a blob via particle accelerator through an event horizon, on a path not intersecting the singularity, and it came out the other side with the only change in velocity being accountable for by interactions with stuff racing towards the singularity."

Wooster took a moment to parse all that. "Well, fuck." Which part he was responding to was left a bit ambiguous.

"Yeah. Still though, while the mana creation or summoning or whatever seems to be linked to carbon interactions, the cavities, or channels as we've come to call it, don't have to be biological. The spell I just cast I did so by pushing mana into a hole in a thin couple of layers of plasma-cut sheet metal bolted together that I stuck in one of my arm compartments. Crude prototype, but it's just a prototype so, eh."

"Ok," Wooster sighed, "but how does the spell work?" Tyrese was a smart guy but by damned gods did he ramble.

"Ok, so these variables are all loosely typed which like oh dear god no why - of course, this could actually translate to a rant about bananas made of francium, who knows, all of this is reverse-engineering - but anyway getting the location of particles costs very little mana, actually acting on them costs by far the most, and the logic section of the runes costs next to nothing. The first section here," Tyrese pointed at a part of a diagram floating midair, "defines protons as things made of two up quarks and one down quark plus associated gluons, then this next bit defines neutrons as two down quarks and one up quark plus associated gluons." They, for once in their life, waited for the other party to acknowledge that they were following.

"Makes sense so far." Wooster nodded.

"This section," he waved, as excellent at explaining things as ever, "is for telling the code, magic, whatever, what an atom is. And then this like nine-tenths of the runes is for defining molecules. There's gotta be a better way of doing this but it works for now. All of this'll probably be refined and just copypasted between spells. As it stands now this part is a mess.”

Tyrese fiddled with the hologram he was showing Wooster, blocking out the previous section of incomprehensible gibberish, having it instead show a section, more or less translated to English rather than Runic, readable by anyone, not just those that had spent the last several days pulling their hair out over defining molecules.

mol = Molecule within input[1] of new Point(0, input[0], 0);

i = 0;

while(i

parts = all within mol[i];

vel = new Vector(0,0,0);

j = 0;

while(j

vel += parts[i].velocity;

}

vel /= parts.size();

j = 0;

while(j

applyForce(parts[i], vel * parts[i].mass * input[2] * (input[3] ? -1 : 1))

}

}

“Next, we move on to the section of space we want to work with. The geometric center of the runes is the starting point, which is going to add all sorts of design difficulties I'm betting, and for this spell we define a point in space offset from the origin by a vector. For now, I have the direction constant rather than variable, and the metal aligned so that the direction is the same as that of my arm. For the magnitude of that vector, aka how far away the 0-dimensional point we're working with is from the origin, is the first input, or input[0] since we’re following the standard of starting from 0, not 1."

"So pretty much you wave around your arm and there's, in terms of the spell at least, a point following it a certain distance away, like if you were to stop a laser midair?"

“Yeah. All of the runes have a power in and power out section, but no slots or whatever you want to call it for information, except for the input runes, where the number of the input corresponds to its size relative to other inputs, smallest as the first, instead they’re just chained together in series. All of the inputs are read as numbers, but clearly, the runes can communicate more advanced concepts with each other, what with passing back and forth 3d spaces and arrays of molecules. There doesn’t seem to be a physical information carrier, or maybe there is and it tunnels through wherever the mana comes from in the first place.

We’ve been trying to access the information in one spell with another, to no avail. Having the hardware and software be the same thing, and having the physical arrangement of such affect the origin of the spell, is a bit odd. For now, picture it as simply any other programming language, but with a single character for each different word.

I cast the spell by pushing mana into five different holes in the metal, one as the main power source, the other four for variable inputs, with tunnels to the actual input section of the input runes. This first input is the magnitude for the vector for the offset from the origin point. All of this later and we have defined to the spell a point in space, say point k. And since point k updates every tick of the spell, we don't have to account for the movement of the station. Or the solar system, or the galaxy."

"And then the three-dimensional space in question is gotten by offset from point k?"

"Correct, this part's really simple, space m is just everything within a radius of point k. The radius is the second input. Then mol," he pointed back at the example, “is every molecule, as defined earlier, within space m.”

Wooster nodded to show he was still listening.

“Then for each molecule, an overall velocity is found, and that velocity is added to by pushing all the component parts in the same direction. Increased speed means overall higher kinetic energy throughout the substance means higher temperature. This stuff seems to treat particles as discreet points instead of waves, which isn’t how physics works last I checked but it works so whatever.”

Wooster waited for a second, but it appeared they were done talking. "And the fourth variable input multiplies the vector for applying force by negative one if there is any such input?"

"Oh right, that. Theoretically, this means the spell can cool stuff down as well as heat it up, but it's prone to overshooting instead, so the molecule's velocity just oscillates back and forth. We're working on a version two where you input a specific temperature to aim towards and the spell alters the velocity of each of the affected molecules by a specific amount. Of course, as it stands right now this spell can only use positive coordinates, but that can be easily negated by just rotating the frame of reference."

"...I'm certainly not a physicist, but shouldn't the uncertainty principle be interfering with pushing individual quarks?"

"A, no, in such a case you need only position, not velocity, of the quarks and electrons, as velocity is being added to, not read, it's only of the molecule for which both is required, and B, this stuff just completely ignores that oh so annoying part of reality anyway."

"Huh."

"Yeah. Anyway, I mentioned having the direction of the heating sphere being fixed, but so far as we've tested you can change the shape of what the mana's flowing through via servos and flexible materials, or nanobots, etcetera, and the spell will work per the new shapes, in addition to simply having a computer control the mana flow rate into the inputs. In other words, I should be able to get my implants to track the position of my eyeballs and use them to control the location of the spell. We're close to getting working a spell to manipulate electrons to flip a single bit in a computer's memory, and regular computer code is certainly less cumbersome than the logic runes, so we may very well be able to shortcut a lot of things by having the spells that retrieve data and tell it to a computer combined with sections of flexible runes controlled by the same computer."

"We find magic and immediately say it's too bulky, time for digital integration, huh? Neat." Wooster paused. "Of course, that begs the question, how long till any computer can cast any spell by taking in the position and velocity of everything within an area, parsing all of such data, and iteratively manipulating a physical representation of one point in space and one vector, and you can simply download reality-bending powers? Of course, all of that depends on a source of mana other than a person."

"Oh yeah, we managed to make algae emit mana by placing a thin film of it in the middle of a mana containment ring, aka a torus of electromagnets, and jumpstarting the process with a decent chunk of mana. The current theory is that the mana basically clings to itself and yanks more out of the mana dimension, or wherever it is that we're able to conjure it from, via its existing velocity. Another point for it having to do with carbon reactions, not souls or whatever."

"Ah. So we can scale it up, have massive mana farms."

"Yeah. Assuming that mana doesn't just run out one day or something like that, that it's not destroyed by using it in a spell, but instead cycles back to from wherever it comes, then that would have some interesting implications regarding the conservation of energy wouldn't it?"