Originally published at: On The Problem of Technobabble and Ontotechnology | The Associated Worlds
(An In-Character Meta Explanation)
“This metal is unaffected by entropy over time? How does that work?”
“We taught the atoms to sing time-refusal.”
“Oh, come on. That’s not… what does that even mean?”
“You see those thirty fat volumes of technomagical equations to make the sanest man go mad?”
“…atoms that sing time-refusal. Got it.”
Relevant older shitpost:
The laws of physics? What are you, a narc?
The big question this makes me think about right now, of course, is what do ontotech equipment, such as vector control devices and kinetic barriers, or the stuff that makes muon metals stable, look like inside? What sort of physical process lets you interact with this stuff?
“No User Serviceable Parts Inside”
What does it look like?
It looks like a box. It has some pretty chonky power feeds, and a standard data connector, and maybe some coolant lines, and if you lift the panel on the side, the manual override controls.
Now, if you open up that box, you’ll find that most of its volume is taken up by boring old fairly standard components whose job is more managing the systems than anything else. Racks of nanocircs, electronics boards, heat sinks, that sort of thing. And a few small components here and there, plastered with warning labels.
But you want to know what it looks like inside those?
It looks Wrong.
It looks Wrong in all the ways that an optical illusion can look wrong, except you know it’s not an illusion. It’s a six-dimensional solid designed by the love-child of Escher and Cthulhu that stubbornly refuses to look as flat as reality, fashioned from a trillion tiny crystals etched with patterns taken from the mycelial dreams of Vernor Vinge and HP Lovecraft’s telepathic joint trip. It sounds like God rocking out on a cosmic-string guitar while angels throat-sing a microtonal arrangement of the music of the spheres in counterpoint. It feels like cosmic understanding half a beat away, and smells like ozone, petrichor, and for some reason, mint.
Don’t touch it. Didn’t you read the warning label?
“We can do this one of two ways. Either you can handle the gross physical effects…”
“Or?”
“I can give you the sort of lecture that will require you to roll a 10D10 on your SAN for every second of discussion. When you hit zero SAN, your head explodes backwards in time.”
“…gross physical effects it is!”
Okay, so the above is the poetic answer I wrote last night in bed. Now let’s try for the slightly more serious one.
In terms of what they look like, bear in mind that by far the largest part of any ontotechnological device is made up of perfectly mundane components doing perfectly mundane component things. Everything needs power, cooling, and compute, not to mention other housekeeping services. Only the core weird bits will look weird. More importantly, since they all do different things, they’ll all look differently weird.
That said, common elements indicative of this sort of thing include:
As for:
What sort of physical process lets you interact with this stuff?
You are performing, essentially, a very complicated high-energy at-the-edge-of-physics version of “↑↑↓↓←→←→BA”.
I have written various things in the past on the assorted theories of physics and metaphysics that make up the basis for ontotechnology in-'verse, but while there are all sorts of variations and complications which can be summed up by not yet having a complete Theory of Everything And Also Everything Else, you can generally assume that the universe is a self-computing information system (“it is bit”) and, like most information systems, you can conveniently exploit it if you know the right bits to tickle.
Additional note:
A lot of those “metadata” editations are, in my conphysics, mediated by dark matter-type interactions. So if you’re seeing (via some really complicated detectors we don’t know how to make yet) a whole lot of phaetons and axions and sterile neutrinos, that sort of thing, then you’re seeing live ontotech in action.
Or you’ve caught the universe doing something interesting. Could go either way. But it’s probably the ontotech.
So it sounds like it boils down, eventually, to “very specific patterns of familiar (to Eldrae) physical interactions” and “particularly those involving some of the normally “weak” interactions”, and then “many of the more familiar / basic ontotech applications involve a fair amount of complex compounding of these interactions”.
Why does “watching the universe do something interesting (by Eldrae standards)” sound like “standing at Ground Zero to the Tsar Bomba test”?
I imagine that a good way to think about it is to imagine you’re Ben Franklin, and you’ve just been handed a wafer fresh out of a TSMC foundry.
You know a thing or two about electricity, you discovered it after all, but claims of the gal who handed you the wafer that this thing runs on electricity don’t make any sense. She claims there are versions of your Leyden jars hidden away inside there, but beyond looking like a piece of rainbow-coloured stained glass you don’t see how the wafer can contain much of anything.
She also talks about how the wafer is designed to be resistant to electromagnetic interference, which is gobbledygook to you because until five minutes ago you had no idea that electricity and lodestones were even related, or could influence each other.
You’re especially perplexed when you ask her to explain what these “transistors” she keeps talking about are, and she breaks out some newfangled wizardry she claims is called “quantum mechanics”, that supposedly will be discovered in the next century by staring really hard at the colour of an oven, something you had never once questioned in your distinguished scientific career.