Chapter 3
Technomancer
“Logic and magic seldom mix” is something that Malowin had once believed.
He’d never been very good at English, or history, or any science that required a lot of writing.
But he’d always been good at maths. Rules and logic and deductions and calculations.
It seemed about as far away from magic as possible, and he loved it.
He studied it through college—British college, that is; not American college, or any other country’s version of college, for that matter.
Here, he discovered programming: more rules, and more logic.
It was perfect. Something he was good at, that he enjoyed, and that, most importantly, he’d chosen.
He never imagined that there would be a magical equivalent to maths, so when he applied for further studies, he was delighted to find out about technomancy.
It was the following day, and Mal was sitting at the back of his class, fully engaged in his lecturer’s rhetoric.
He was very happy not to be thinking about secret societies or their strange assignments.
He was in his final year of study and had become fairly proficient by this point.
The weird celestial soul that controlled this magic cared not for transformations as others did.
It only wanted Mal to use the magic well, to manipulate energy with grace and precision.
Large parts of his course consisted of computer architecture, operating system procedures, binary interpretation, and low-level programming.
But the best parts were the magic: manipulating energy fields on a nano-scale, guiding electrons through a circuit, feeling and altering electromagnetic fields in a hard drive, intercepting and changing operating commands, and much more.
It was nothing flashy, but incredibly useful if you know what you’re doing.
People unfamiliar with tech often called technomancers “computer whisperers,” and they weren’t far off.
It took a few years, but now he could read a hard drive as well as any computer.
Like most students, he’d created his own simplified operating system that he accessed through a smartwatch on his wrist. It was a perfect neural interface.
He could store images straight from his mind and encode them perfectly into a file.
Audio had taken him a bit longer to grasp, but he’d gotten pretty good at that as well.
He sat recording the lecture straight onto his hard drive for him to listen back to later.
He stored screenshots of the projector slides alongside the audio and time-stamped everything so that his revision would be as easy as possible later in the year.
He was happy. He was about as far away from corpses as one could be—his own digital world.
It was getting to the end of his lecture, and his mind started to wander; he knew the audio would go fuzzy in this section when he listened back to it later.
He glanced around the class and thought about lunch.
He looked to the door, ready and eager for the class to finish, when his stomach dropped in his chest. Like a ghoul from a ghost story, Sergeant Desdemona Anastos was lurking by the door.
The real, corpuscular world crashed down around him.
The words Oh fuck shot through his head so fast he was pretty sure he’d recorded them into his lecture audio.
She wasn’t supposed to be here. He was supposed to meet her later.
That’s what Walters had said. Why? Why was she here now?
His eagerness to leave had now turned into a tense wishing that the lecture would never end, and as such, in accordance with Sod’s law, it ended five minutes early.
Mal was slow to rise and waited until he was the last student in the class before making for the door. Des was blocking his path.
“You can’t be here,” Mal said, now trapped in the classroom with his teacher.
“And yet, here I am.” Des was dressed in her full police getup: hi-vis vest, tactical belt, cap and all. The teacher witnessing this got up from his desk.
“Is Mal in some kind of trouble?” Mr. Russell asked, a mask of concern hiding his true motive: gossip and drama.
“Not at all. He’s a consultant, apparently. Is he any good at this stuff?” Des said, swirling her finger at the classroom.
Mr. Russell scoffed in a way that caused Mal a mild offense. “He’s not bad. Not my best, but he’s not failing.”
“So it’s not tech Walters uses you for, is it,” Des said, eyeing Mal.
“If you need a tech consultant, I’m always available for …” Mr. Russell trailed off mumblingly before sitting back down.
“Thank you, sir,” Des said. “Unfortunately, I’m not in charge of hiring new consultants.”
Mal had never wanted to leave a conversation more.
That’s not true. One time, his skeletal parents attempted to give him “the talk” and spent the whole conversation lamenting the fact they no longer had genitals and how this was somehow his fault.
He’d decided this memory was best dealt with in therapy—that was, once he was able to afford a therapist that could keep necromancy a secret.
His conversation with Des was coming in at a close second or third.
Mal couldn’t see how it could get any worse.
So, in accordance with Sod’s law, his least favorite person on campus arrived and joined in.
Hala Khalil Salih Al-Bābili was a lovely young woman, of which Mal wanted nothing to do with.
Not because she was mean, as by all accounts she was exceptionally kind and generous with her time.
Not because she was popular, a trait Mal tried not to hold against her (having never been popular himself); though she seemed to have drifted away from the “popular” crowd in the last year or so.
Not because she wasn’t pretty. Mal certainly thought she was, with her long, dark hair, warm brown skin, and a smile you couldn’t refuse.
Mal wanted nothing to do with her for one simple reason: She knew he had a secret, and she would not stop going on about it whenever they met.
“Is Mal in trouble?” Hala said, peering round the classroom door next to Des.
“Nope, no trouble as of yet,” Des said, happy to be attracting attention.
“Is this about his big secret?” Hala said, smiling wide at the thought she might finally get some answers. Upon hearing this, Des’s face lit up, as if the pair had both discovered they were into the same niche hobby.
“Mallo has a big secret?” Des said, with so much joy you could barely tell she was being facetious.
“Ohh, I like Mallo. Can I keep that?” Hala said.
“It’s all yours.”
“Will you both please leave. Me. Alone.” Mal went to walk off, but with Hala and Des blocking the doorway, he had to tamper down the bluster with which he’d started his walk.
“You see how he doesn’t deny that he has a secret?” Hala said, skewering Mal further.
“You’re right, he doesn’t.” Des introduced herself to Hala, who introduced herself right back. “So what I want to know is, how do you know he has a secret?”
“Psychomancy,” Hala said. “I can read it all over him. I can’t tell you what it is, but I know it’s there.
That, and when I ask about it, he gets super defensive.
” Her inability to read his mind was of little comfort to Mal, as her persistence had almost caused him to tell her on multiple occasions just to get her off his back.
“That’s a rare gift,” Des said, producing a card. “If you ever feel like helping us out, we can always use a good consultant.” Hala took the card. Mr. Russell grumbled something in the background.
“YES,” Hala said. “I’d love to help. I’m free now if that matters.”
“Excellent! We were just about to head out ourselves. Mallo’s helping me out with something. I don’t see why you couldn’t come along.” Des had, in fact, taken out two cards. One of which she now presented to him. “In case you get lost on our little outing and need to contact me.”
Mal knew what taking it meant. What had Walters said? “She could follow you to the ends of the earth.” Damn diviners. He’d hesitated for too long, and now it felt rude not to take the card.
“Not got anything to hide, do we, Mallo?”
You know I do, Mal thought, begrudgingly taking the card and putting it in his pocket.
“I have another class in here now, y’know,” Mr. Russell said from behind them. Clearly annoyed that he was the only one not getting to be a consultant.
“We’ll be off now. Apologies,” Des said, finally removing herself from the door.
Mal reluctantly followed as they set off through the old institution hallways of Dunwich University.
They were all of roughly the same age, but somehow being a cop made Des seem older in Mal’s eyes.
Des and Hala chatted as they walked. Des talked about joining the police through a detective’s fast track that involved a part-time divination degree, and Hala talked about how she was one of only three people on her course and how off-putting she found the other two.
Mal enjoyed listening to them talk, mainly because the conversation had drifted away from him.
They walked out onto the campus grounds.
Mal’s building was relatively modern as far as the campus was concerned.
Most of the campus consisted of old Gothic buildings that looked like miniature castles.
Each housed a vague category of magic. There were Practical Magics like teleportation, telekinesis, and augmentation.
There were Artistic Magics like audiomancy, chromamancy, and graphomancy.
But the domain with the most impressive buildings were the Scientific Magics.
Natural magic, closest to biology, was split into so many different houses that it took up nearly a quarter of the campus.
You could always catch a glimpse of some odd bestial transformation when you walked past. Transmutors, closest to chemistry, had a large, intricate building made of the strangest materials, owing to their ability to change the elemental composition of matter.
Mal once saw a transmutation student turn water into wine on a dare.
This school was not to be confused with transfiguration, or transformational magic, which was considered closer to drama, mostly because the transformations were more complex—say a person into a chair—but these transformations were always temporary.
Mal’s technomancy was grouped under Elemental Magics, as technically, energy manipulation was a category of storm mage.
The two fields were completely different and, as far as he knew, had different souls of magic governing them, but the association had always bugged Mal.
Storm mages were by and large all flashy show-offs.
He thought it must be a prerequisite to study the thing.
After their nice walk through the campus, they arrived at Des’s car.
Hala got in the front, causing Mal to feel like the child of the group as he got into the back.
He thought about how, under any other circumstances, a road trip would be fun.
Who wouldn’t enjoy the attention? But now he was trapped in a car with two people insistent on discovering his secrets.
Mal didn’t want to think about what the Order did to those who divulged their secrets.
Probably the same thing they did to necromancers who didn’t join them.
“Where are we heading?” Mal asked as they left campus.
“We’re heading to Avalon,” Des said. “We’re going to interview one of the most powerful wizards alive.”