Magic is Programming

"Ok, I admit it, a keyword to siphon mana off of someone else's spell and use it for your own is a bust. No resonance at all." Carlos sighed and slumped over his knees.

Amber laughed. "It was kind of ridiculous to hope for something like that anyway. If it existed and people knew about it, wouldn't literally everyone be using it constantly?"

"Not against people who don't cast spells!" Carlos grinned cheekily.

"You oaf! You tried for a version that would work on non spells too, remember?"

"Yeah, yeah, laugh while you can. I'll find something that will work, and then you'll see." They both chuckled at that one.

Amber let her laughter die off, and sighed. "Will we, really? We've gone from level thirteen in a level seventeen area, to level fourteen in a level twenty area. They're speeding up, and we're running out of time."

Carlos let his head fall forward and rest in his hands for a bit. The bare metal of their cramped prison seemed more and more oppressive as time went on, and it had taken him a while to realize that the feeling was actually coming from the increasing pressure of ambient mana weighing on his soul. "…I don't know. But I'm not going to give up until it's over."

Amber leaned over and put her left hand on Carlos's shoulder. "Neither am I, but what do we try next?"

Carlos looked up and chewed his lip. "…Let me think. We've tried a few random guesses at things that would be useful, and that's gotten us nowhere but wasted time. Maybe things that can be deduced have already all been discovered, but that's by other people. We haven't learned them, and maybe we can re-discover something."

Huh. Re-discover. That reminded him, he was pretty sure this whole system of keywords and program-like incantations to cast spells was artificial, designed and created by someone long ago. Or by some group, more likely. So, if a group of powerful people intentionally designed a spellcasting programming-like language, what would they logically put in it? If they'd used the more intuitive variety of soul structures to do it, or mixed that with the way dungeons did magic, they could have put in almost any effect they could conceive of, but what would make sense that they should and would have put in?

He really wasn't sure. Judging by the keywords he already knew, there must be many simple effects, so primitive that they cannot be conceptually broken into even smaller and simpler pieces. That didn't really help, though; everything he could think of that might be primitive enough had the same problem of being useless against the power disadvantage they faced. He needed a different approach. What did he know, or what could he deduce, about those long-ago system creators? Could he imagine himself in their place, and figure out how they might have thought?

The makers of the incantation system must have been powerful. Incredibly powerful, to have created something that became effectively part of the world's magical physics. And those people, they had been dreamers. Altruists and idealists, they'd made their system to work for everyone. Anyone who studied and learned how could use it. People like that, with the power and ability to create such a system, if they had wanted it to be restricted then it would be restricted. There'd be a list of approved people, or maybe some token only they could make that granted access, and for anyone unapproved it just wouldn't work no matter how you tried.

So, consider a group of people who are designing a system for any random educated person to use. These people would have wanted to empower the world, enabling the masses to learn and use magic like they did. There didn't seem to be any hint of ideological leanings in the types of spells they had made possible; so far as he could tell, the only ideal that had made it into the system's design was that anyone could theoretically use it. In accordance with that ideal, they would have wanted everyone to have access to proper knowledge about it. And if they were smart, and surely they must have been to pull off such a project, they should have known that greedy powermongers would try to restrict and control access to that knowledge. To counter that, they had one tool. One ultimate, perfect, tool that only someone who could match their own incredible achievement would have any hope of restricting. And that thought gave Carlos an idea.

In Earth's history of computer development, a similar need to broadly disseminate knowledge had arisen, though with far lesser stakes and opposition. To satisfy that need, early software engineers had created and used several mechanisms of providing access to critical knowledge, and one of those mechanisms would have been perfect for this world's system of incantation spellcasting. If Carlos was right, then the keyword he was about to try to learn would be the holy grail of magecraft. It logically should be famously common knowledge if it existed, and it would have taken a strange confluence of events to bury knowledge of this particular keyword in the dust of forgotten history without losing knowledge of the entire system along with it. This keyword idea was certainly a long shot. But hey, he was desperate, and he doubted anyone who didn't suspect the system's artificial origins would have thought to try it. So why not go for broke?

Somewhat hesitantly, Carlos began forming a blob of solid but flexible mana that could take shape into a learned keyword. He thought of how Earth's version of this worked, the ways it could be used that would be applicable here. He worked at detailing the concept in his mind, and in a moment of thought about what else to add, he considered the other major factor in learning keywords: the actual word.

If the incantations system was artificially designed, then the words it used were most likely not arbitrary or random, but simply words from the system's creators' native language, and his comprehension aid had proven remarkably capable for translating between languages. If his deductions were right, it had even already demonstrated translation of that specific language every time he'd read a written incantation. It didn't work nearly as well for translating English into that language, but he had a feeling that was because the incantation language, as a programming-like language, lacked the flexibility and ambiguity needed for any translation to be "close enough". A translation into the incantation language was either exact, or did not exist.

A translation into the conversational language that the incantation language had copied words from, however, would have that flexibility to let his comprehension aid translate things into the closest match. His magical translation ability was also remarkably good at taking intended conceptual meaning into account. So, the closest concise way to take the concept he had in mind and express something similar to it in the conversational language in question… was a single word. That was a promising sign.

Carlos held the concept in mind, combined it with the word his comprehension aid had just translated for him, and pushed both of them together into the blob of mana he hoped would soon encode it… And there was resonance! Holy shit, he really was on to something with this! His heart started pounding with excitement, and his mouth curved into a broad grin, and he didn't notice either change. He was too focused on tweaking the concept, letting the resonance guide him in encoding the new keyword into his soul, just as he had so many times before. He finished, and this time he didn't need to assemble it into a larger combination to make a full spell. This particular keyword was a complete spell on its own, even without a semicolon. It had to be in order to serve its purpose as well as possible.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

He turned to face Amber, his face beaming ecstatically. "I did it. See if you can learn this spell by sensing it!" Then he spoke a single word; a word whose translation into English was intimately familiar to countless Earth programmers who had experience with certain common command line applications.

help

Immediately, information was pumped into his mind from no discernible source, and his comprehension aid and other soul structures put it into a familiar form.

Universal Access Shared Interface to General Purpose Magic, version 3

Available verbal parameters of help command:

• paraminfo
• usage
• commands
• command
• syntax
• effects
• effect

Use "help paraminfo" followed by a parameter to get detailed information about that parameter.

"YES!" Carlos yelled and flung his hands into the air in triumph, heedless of the metal ceiling close above him. His hands slammed into the ceiling, and he hastily brought them back down and shook them in an attempt to reduce the stinging pain of the impact. Despite the safeguard spells cushioning the impact it still hurt quite a bit, but he didn't care. So many of their problems in the last couple weeks had all boiled down to lack of access to knowledge about the incantations language, and now that huge omni-problem was solved. He would still have to put work into applying his programming skills, and judging by the complexity of the spellwork used to capture and contain them that would take a great deal of work, but he finally had the complete language reference he needed to do so unconstrained. It would have been nice to figure this out before being carried towards their permanent deaths in a featureless metal box, but that was just details, right?

Amber had flinched back from his sudden exclamation and movement, but leaned forward again. Both of her eyebrows were raised high. "I have no idea what that spell did, it was over too fast. What did you figure out?"

Carlos blew on his stinging scraped hands a couple times before looking back up to grin at her again. "What did I figure out? Heh. Everything. I figured out everything."

It took several minutes for Carlos to calm down from the excitement of his discovery, and to explain just what it was that he'd learned. For a while Amber couldn't stop shaking her head in amazed disbelief. Carlos offered to try to teach it to her, but she declined. "Wait until we're out, back in Dramos, and you can send the concept mentally. I don't think I can really comprehend it right now, it's just too huge."

"Fair enough." Carlos nodded. "Then it's up to me to use it to find something that will help."

Just then, his introspector popped up an alert.

Mana compressed. Level 15 reached.

Synergy unification update:

• Largest group of structures with total synergy: 10
• Number of synergies in group: 45
• Synergies to structures ratio: 4.5
• Resulting synergies level required for unification: 15

Synergy unification completed!

• 10 soul structures unified into 1.
• 9 empty soul structure slots now available.

WARNING: Overall mana absorption and development efficiency decreased from 100% to 1% due to empty soul structure slots.

Carlos took a moment to take in the information, and when he read the last line he blanched, his face turning deathly pale. "No-no-no-no-no-no-no-no-no-no, no, no, oh god, this can't be happening, not now! Fuuuuck!" He started hyperventilating.

Amber stared at him and blinked a few times. She started leaning forward, then her mana compressed to level fifteen too, and she froze for several seconds. "Oh. Shit!"

Carlos swayed for a moment, but caught himself and started taking more intentional and regular deep breaths, trying to calm his racing heart. Maybe he should make a soul structure sometime to stop himself from panicking, now that he had nine free slots. It seemed an absurd abundance of potential, on top of what he'd already had. No wonder nobles were so powerful. This must be why Lorvan had been so cagey about what he called the second stage.

Suddenly faced with the prospect of designing he didn't even know yet how many more soul structures - would the new ones unify too, and at what point, and just with each other or also with the first unified super-structure? - he rebelled against the very idea of it. He managed to calm his breathing close to normal, then closed his eyes for a moment and wrestled a determined frown onto his face. Thus settled, Carlos opened his eyes and declared his intent. "No. I have spent enough time fiddling with hardware and leaving my true expertise of software to languish. I finally have the full reference documentation of the entire language, and I am going to use it. I will come back to this whole unification development… thing, when I have a proper repertoire of spells to use it with."

Amber just breathed quietly for a while, before slowly nodding. "I don't think I fully understand everything you just said, but I agree that we should learn spells and spellcraft before deciding what to do about soul structures. And you'd better get on with it already!"

Carlos nodded, and cast his new spell again. Interestingly, it did not require that its parameters be learned and encoded keywords. He just had to speak them, and the spell operated some kind of language recognition feature to determine its response.

help paraminfo effects

Information about how to use "help effects" poured into his mind. As he expected, it could be used to simply list literally every single effect the system had. That was probably an overwhelmingly long list, however, and he was gratified to find there were further options to search through various categories. He set to work, browsing through categories that seemed relevant for either bypassing or breaking - but bypassing was probably more viable - barriers.

The most promising possibility initially seemed to be teleporting, but he remembered the times they'd been teleported by a scroll or another mage, and he didn't think they had enough levels and mana to give a spell that much power. The level of the ambient mana pouring in ticked up again, and their rate of absorbing it had all but stopped. He cursed at the increased feeling of oppressive pressure, and tried to work faster. Were there specialty types of teleportation that used less power? He had analyzed all the magic keeping them contained by now, and he was confident none of it would prevent a teleport. If he could find a variant that was cheap enough and still did something useful, that could help.

Ah, yes, there was an effect that would teleport his magic. Not him, not even anything physical at all, but another spell or effect. It would, for the purposes of his mana and spells, make a connection between him and somewhere else that did not cross the distance between. It had some major limitations, including on the amount of power he could send through it, but it would let him sense mana outside their boxy prison despite the tuned barrier on it. In fact, thinking of mana sense, surely there were spells for seeing and hearing nearby areas, and he could combine it with those to get an eye on their captors.

Carlos dug through the effect categories again, and soon found something for perceiving light and vibrations with his mana. The system didn't actually give him the effect concept itself, just a written text description, but he was fairly sure it was designed to be combined with other things to interpret or display what it sensed. He suspected he might not have time to figure out how to make that work, but he hoped his comprehension aid could handle understanding the information directly instead. The ambient mana level ticked up yet again, to level twenty three, and he shuddered under the increased pressure on his soul with eight levels of difference in its density and power. It wasn't dangerous quite yet, but it was becoming extremely uncomfortable.

Putting those two effects together into a single spell proved tricky, until he realized he was being stupid and should just make separate spells for each. They crossed another zone, into level twenty four, before he finally finished that. He cast the first spell, to form a teleport-like connection for his magic to bridge a path around the box's wards, and didn't get to cast the second spell before something happened.

[CARLOS! I can sense you again!]

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