#narrativetoolbox #narrativehyperobject
Morven looked her up and down. “You haven’t asked the question yet.”
“What question?”
“Well, different people ask it differently. I figure you don’t make it this far without being at least a little open minded, but most folk can't just reboot their worldview at the drop of a hat. So even though the company makes no bones about what it does, and even though they take you through all this in orientation, people always have to ask. They can't help themselves."
"Ask what?"
"Is this magic shit for real?"
Nomi frowned. “Well, of course it is.”
“That simple, huh?”
“CCI is a three-billion-dollar business. You don’t get that big without having something to sell.”
Morven snorted. "Then I've got a bridge you might be interested in."
I have a long-neglected novel kicking around that's about 30% through a major redraft. One day, I will get back to it, but realistically, that will not be for a long while.
The central conceit is 'magic is real, magic has always been real, and Silicon Valley has finally gotten ahold of it and is selling it as a service'. You can probably imagine how I'd feel about that.
Magic in the book, at least at time of writing this, is a vastly complex mental contortion, pulling energy from Elsewhere and constructing a sprawling mental model to manage and direct that flow to produce effects in the physical world. 'Props' help -- physical artefacts or magic circles that represent tangible analogues to elements of the model. But, fundamentally, a practitioner has to build, hold, and manipulate some hideously complex system in their mind, without screwing it up and exploding their own head.
(One of my rough sketches for this idea was: if the Craft Sequence is 'what if magic were law?', this is 'what if magic were architecture?'.)
I bring this up for no reason that really has anything to do with the book. I made the connection because I felt like I reached this point with my own mental model of 'how writing works' (which is, in fact to say 'how my writing works'). I had so many scattered pieces of insight and tools and lens and a sense of process that I just stopped being able to hold it all in my head at once. Which meant I wrote it down.
Obsidian was great for this, actually -- building a navigable, wiki-style map of my writing process, with all the little nooks and crannies to stash 'sometimes advice' without getting in the way of a clear process. Now, I literally walk through it whenever I'm working on something, recognising the step between phases and reading the traveller's notes I have written to myself.
I introduce this concept here because I might talk about various bits and pieces of it in future shards. Hopefully without exploding my own head.
Anyway, here's an unpolished quote-dump from the WIP manuscript which I haven't touched since squints May last year.
The walls, floor, and ceiling of Remote Viewing Suite 3 were polished obsidian. Vast panels of the stuff, unbroken except for some clever affordances to allow the door to open, and sixteen recesses where shard-like slivers of the rock had been meticulously cut out and extracted.
It must have cost an unthinkably large amount of money, and CCI had four others just like it. Every time Morven came into one of the rooms, she couldn’t help but feel genuine awe that people had been able to make one of these – mixed with the pit-of-the-stomach disgust that came with understanding the social politics that meant anyone could afford to.
Combine that with what these rooms were used for, and she pretty much wanted to throw up every time she stepped inside. Vertigo induced by intersecting ley-lines of capitalism.
Morven placed four candles on the floor, lit them, then closed the door. The polished black glass cast cascading reflections. It didn’t magnify the dim light of the candles as much as refract them into infinity, a thousand points of light insignificant against a vast, swallowing blackness. Morven was surrounded by uncountable images of herself. In the unbounded space of the viewing room, her red hair was black, her normally pale skin dark. The expressions that looked back at her were not kind. She looked away reflexively.
She laid a thick aluminium bar in the middle of the candles and painted a trail of silver-infused ink to connect candles and bar. Remote viewing over any distance requires intense amounts of energy, even if you were just doing it through the compact scrying mirror that traditional practitioners usually preferred. Powering a whole room was a different order of magnitude altogether. These items were Morven’s safety valve. Next to it, she set a handheld audio recorder she’d checked out from the desk when she’d turned over her bag, which contained all her electronics.
...
Morven marked out a set of geometric glyphs on the wall in the same silvered ink. She took her time. Normally, she’d be building her mental model while she laid in the physical geometry, slowly gathering the energy she needed for the working, rather than performing a big draw all at once, but the viewing suites required such a high throughput of energy that she’d have to start big, and it wasn’t worth the risk of starting that until everything was set up.
She settled herself in the middle of the room, candle circle on her right, recorder close at hand to her left, and checked everything one last time. Satisfied with the physical arrangements, she closed her eyes and began to focus. She spent a few minutes just breathing, clearing her head of anything outside of the room. Then, she began laying down the foundations of the working’s mental model.
She reached out with her consciousness, and in her mind’s eye, she saw the great wilds of energy swirling around in what she had come to call ‘infinite arcane space’. She represented herself as a tiny dot, insignificant against the roiling storms, but still a gate through which that power could be drawn.
In her mind, she wove together an architecture of silver conduits that would haul in the energy, with locks and irises and channels that would direct and control that flow. She built great sweeping pools to hold the energy and distribute it wherever she needed. The whole form stood in her mind, a complex, revolving pattern aligned with her intent. She touched each element in turn, and then, finally, she was ready to begin.
Slowly, she opened the floodgates.
The charge rushed into Morven’s mind, so quickly at first that it threatened to overrun her model, to drown out her control and crash through her physical form and shatter it like glass. She breathed, refreshing her mental image and relaxing, allowing the energy to pour into the great pools. They filled quickly, and her brain began to itch, aching to release the power building there.
She tested her insurance policy. With her eyes still closed, she opened her connection to the candle circle, sending the power down through the silvered ink at her feet. Through her eyelids, candles erupted with violent fire, flare-bright. The first time she’d tried that in a viewing suite, her eyes had been open, and she’d almost killed herself. The mirrored space had made the light dazzlingly bright, enough of a shock to threaten the integrity of the model in her head.
The power-sink worked, the metal bar warming and thrumming with energy. If things started to spin out of control, she’d have somewhere to dump the power aside from her own limbic system. She throttled the connection, and the candles dimmed, the excess energy she’d dumped there escaping as heat and light.
Morven reached out to close her connection to infinite arcane space, to stem the influx of power, but the reservoirs were filling too swiftly. It was time to put the gathered power to work.
She opened her eyes and shunted the energy towards its real purpose – the silver glyphs on the glass all around her. It spidered out from the marks over the surface of the obsidian, a spreading cloud of inky black erasing the reflections until Morven seemed to float, suspended in a void.
She took a breath.
Across the city, the first set of sibling shards – pieces cut from the obsidian of this room and planted on-location by CCI field staff – began to vibrate. There was a set of these out there for each of today’s assignments, forming a sympathetic connection which Morven could exploit to focus her working.
Black gave way to bright white and then resolved into an image: an office building seen from above – a hawk’s-eye-view from just below the clouds, rendered in full 720 degree panorama over the entire room. Morven hovered in space above a city block, brushing aside a small revolt as her eyes and inner ear fought over conflicting information.
She revolved the model in her mind, as if the whole thing were mounted on a gimbal, and the world shifted in response. She was a disembodied eye floating in space, an entity of air and vision, able to move and observe as she chose – at least within the boundaries created by the sibling shards. She groped to her side, hit the ‘record’ button, and began narrating what she saw with the clinical boredom of a dentist or mortician.
Once the recorder was set, she let the last vestiges of being a body in a room melt away. She took a moment, revelling in the feeling of flight – of unfettered movement through air. She descended, sliding unresisted and unseen through the ceiling of the office block, clipping through the ducts and HVAC conduits, until she was on the top floor that housed the boardroom and executive offices.
Then, she went to work.