One time, in 2021, I started a brief thought experiment about how computing might look different in a world where magic was introduced in prehistory, if a recognizable form of computing would exist at all.
It was pretty fun.
The world presented here is governed by a fundamental sharing its pantheon with force, momentum, energy, taxes, and other such properties of a universe. This fundamental forms the bedrock upon which is built the intersection between what we might call magic and what the denizens of that world might call science. They call it “effect”; linguistically, “effect” and “effect” are treated the same as we would treat “force” and “force”.
But, effect is far different than any physical property. Effect serves only to violate the fundamental properties of reality. It holds terrifying, theoretically unbounded potential. Too many effectic weapons have killed too many people in too many wars. Too many researchers disappear without a trace, the silhouette of their fates encoded in what observations are missing from their notes. Too many delinquent teens use sigils to apply the necessary microeffects to get too many free long-distance calls from too many phone booths. It promises a limitless ability to change, to shape the world to one’s whims, to ensure the impossible, to fulfill any desire.
It takes only, upon delivery, a sacrifice of equivalent desire. It’s often small; lighting a cigarette might zap a few cc’s of blood from your body (but, depending on how hard one tries, lighting the cigarette of that really cool and cute person they just met at a concert might leave them a bit woozy). Lighting the fire that might stop one’s foot from losing a foot to frostbite may bequeath frostbite to both feet of the exact loved one that just so happens to be outside of the range of the hospital.
Even worse are the times when it seems to withhold part of the its consequent for later. One’s lunch suddenly turning moldy during a busy day at work is a comparatively friendly reminder of how little is known. A(n effectic) storm could easily arrive with little warning, and people can simply disappear. Such things are common enough to be normalized.
The mechanics of this “conservation of desire” are unknown, subject to the mindless (hopefully) aetherial currents of unreality. But, one of the greatest and earliest innovations in effectics (the study of effecting (the act of invoking a controlled effect (there are ambient, uncontrolled effects (they can be scary)))) was the discovery that this fundamental could be personified. It only came naturally to bargain with this personified effect, to request certain sacrifices be taken (very carefully, as this freedom of choice also counts towards one’s sacrifice, supposing the proposal was sufficient). Soon after came the honorable profession of contract law.
Even with this innovation, effecting remains extremely dangerous, only performed on a large scale by the most qualified. Nevertheless, effectic technology propelled societies forward, especially once techniques for operating such machines without invoking a sacrifice from the user were discovered. The development of better and safer sacrifice techniques for those directly working with effect allowed for an unprecedented industrial explosion, as effectics joined forces with mechanics and, eventually, electronics to form the automative backbone of modern society.
Of course, with the power of effect, their societies pursued technologies far beyond our comprehension to arrive at solutions to rather familiar problems (the phone exchange, for example, once used essentially the teleportation of photon streams encoding the information in varying frequencies in a similar manner to FM—essentially, transmitting information through teleported color). Similarly, our technology would be completely foreign to them, much of it basically magic.
The most stark difference between our worlds is that they never invented the transistor. They never had a reason to. The integration of effectics and electronics allowed for the functionality that would be provided by diodes and transistors to be bypassed altogether. They barely even have a developed formal logic like ours, thanks to the extreme uncertainty provided by effect, mostly useful for theoretical mathematics. Logics of uncertainty, of desire pushed their society towards an information age of their own.
No transistor means no computers—not the kind flooding the global north, certainly. Mechanical-digital computers exist as calculators, and analog computers, often augmented with effectics, are used to solve more complicated tasks than we tend to use them for. While the technology to build much larger, older computers exists, effectics has ensured that the thought has never made it further than hobbyist tinkering and failed academic proposals. Their effectic information technology focused towards facilitating librarianship and archivism, as opposed to how ours largely started with economic and physics calculations. And, just as we use our computers to approach tasks once considered non-numerical, they use their effectics to approach complex math problems.
Their information age is powered by two technologies, powered by two diametrically opposed superpowers.
The first is infoeffectics. The aforementioned teleporting of colored light is a basic example of this, where sigilic “eyes,” “ears,” and “mouths” are used to encode, transport, and decode information across many vectors. This information can be used in a manner not dissimilar from the computers we know today (though comparing them to quantum computers would be just a bit more apt). Its mother society has used it to further streamline every aspect of the engine that powers their society, to the point where most barriers take the form of the people who can’t keep up.
The second is necroautomation. The brains of the dead are recycled into special necroautomatic sigils, which provide a sort of quasi-logical component for larger sigils. The results are incomparable; no other effectic technology can emulate the particular pattern matching and information processing abilities of a person (at least, not nearly as efficiently or safely). While initially only used for tasks directly appropriate for those abilities, necromechanikers have managed to take advantage of the (dimished, but still present) learning potential of the preserved tissue, paving the way for entire infrastructures to be built on the technology.