Paul Kane

reminds us of the pitfalls and potential benefits of being in the wrong place at the right time – or perhaps that should be the right place at the wrong time?

As a Second Year, Lorna had seen it happen before: the sudden feeding-frenzy around the newcomers, the swift judgements and categorisation, before the adjustment of hierarchy as a kind of composite equation. Beauty; brains (beauty plus brains scored highest; beauty next; brains on its own was a matter of interest rather than sexual power) and then something more amorphous, some quality that had to do with humour or presence or charisma that had its own valency, though no one could rank it easily, that made people flock around, seeking favour.

Books like Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, the Harry Potter series and classics such as Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and the ghost stories of M. R. James have all been credited as inspiring the trend, as well as films like Love Story, Dead Poets Society and Cruel Intentions, not to mention more recent TV shows like A Discovery of Witches (based on the excellent novels by Deborah Harkness), A Series of Unfortunate Events and The Queen’s Gambit, which all helped to fan the flames

She flicked through the pile of paperwork on his desk. She wasn’t looking for anything specific, but that same sense of disquiet, the kind of itch you feel when you wake up knowing you’ve had some bad news but you can’t remember what, drove a desire to pick at something, to cross a line. Going through his stuff was a taboo, he was touchy about his work.

“the great playwright’s writing persona was carefully constructed. Maybe Shakespeare was more like one of the brilliant but cynical minds that work these days in big Hollywood studios, who know how to elicit an emotional landscape that they don’t necessarily feel.

Q: If you don’t mind me backing up a bit, Dr. Thorn, three months with your completed degree seems quite… inexperienced, comparatively.
A: Oh, massively, yes. Ellen’s at the top of her field, so I could understand her being invited. Sort of. But from the day I arrived nobody felt I had a right to be there, which many of them made very clear to me on numerous occasions.

The way technomancy works – from my perspective – is a mix of programming language, you know, binary and such, and a more arcane enchantment. Watching it was like watching a potion get made, where you could see the sparkle of magic or the ether or whatever it was pouring into the code itself, like honey from an open wound. The Olympias were especially graceful with their showmanship. They’d design the code in Python but then pause occasionally to input a rune (Greek, I think, in nature, because Delphi was nothing if not committed to aesthetic) that they’d then enchant into another river of code, like opening up a door or a vault or something. It was fascinating to watch, and visibly draining to the technomancer, who surrendered parts of themselves in the process. Later I’d realize just how easy it was, the conflagration of thought and blood to create some primal spark of sentience. I guess the less controversial word would be intelligence. But I’m feeling contradictory, so let’s call it life

Meaning that what happened to Serena Li – which I assume is the reason we’re here – is the result of staggering collective delusion. Centuries of self-enforcing superstition. You know the quote from Einstein – “science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind”?
Q: I’m familiar, yes.
A: In the absence of actual faith – the kind that moves people to goodness, or at the very least to fear – Delphi had Pythia. If Pythia told every single one of those technomancers to swallow poison, they’d do it. If Pythia said burn it all to the ground, they would. If Pythia said okay, Serena Li, time to die—

I’ll warn you now that I have not an ounce of technomancy in me. I don’t have even a fraction of what Serena Li kept hidden up her sleeve, and certainly no more proficiency or knowledge than required to make my laptop work. I’m not convinced I’d be able to drive a Tesla, which to my knowledge is essentially one large computer. I’ve always had something of a glitch in me, which is why I specialize in cognitive behavioral therapy. I study people. Not machines.

Though, I guess believing in a god who has omnipotence but chooses not to interfere explains how Delphi reconciled their knowledge that being chosen and being shitty weren’t mutually exclusive, or that misusing all that power would not be personally damning in any significant way. (Pythia seemed especially concerned with the nature of sin, but as I told her, real life is not often met with smiting or pillars of salt. Boys will be boys, and inevitably men will be men.)