That's SO COOL—Where Ideas Come From

Disclaimer: my thoughts, this is only definitively true about me, there are exceptions, yadda yadda.

I recently upgraded my SSD to one with 500 gigabytes. It's like moving to Dudley's room from the cupboard under the stairs. Scratch that, it's more like moving to the great hall. There aren't any spiders, and I can bring in so much junk that I won't even care when the sewage level rises above my head.

But back to the computer. I have this compact setup where everything's squeezed into the tiniest space available so it all fits on my desk. I pushed the silver power button, brought the computer down to the floor, and cracked open that little black box.

You should probably clean your computer more than once a year. The box may be small, but that only means that the dust wedges inside instead of settling down. After waving away the initial dust storm, I unscrewed it section by section. There go the sides, that's the fan, those are a nest of cables, that's the power; ah, there's the SSD. Except there were two ports for storage devices, and both were filled. One of them was my SSD, and the other slot was filled with...something. Another few inches of dust, another series of computer parts moved aside, and I got them out.

It was like venturing through a pyramid, one that had been explored time and again, and then suddenly falling through the floor to an unlit section. I had no memory of this other strange device. Half of it was smooth silver with no markings. The other half was a green circuit board, filled with the delicate tracery of tiny wires winding around, fulfilling functions unknown. A series of letters and numbers stood out in the middle in a lighter color than the surrounding green.

Of course, I simply looked it up. Turned out it was an mSATA to SATA converter, or maybe the other way around. Compatability stuff. Sells for about thirty bucks. The magic was gone. I wasn't in a dusty tomb, I was dissecting a computer. Just a computer. Just a series of rocks humanity collectively tricked into thinking.

I don't know how computers work. Sure, I could tell you the popular programming languages, and that this runs Cobol and that uses HTML, and oh my god put that away, it uses Java and what is this, the early 2010s? Beyond that, there's the operating system, the system architecture, the kernel, and gooey machine code. I could tell you that HDDs store data on rotating platters that transcribe data like Vinyl Scratch plays her records, that there's a motherboard interpreting those ones and zeroes, that there's a GUI hashing out vectors and doing all sorts of fancy maths and physics calculations and so on for pretty much everything that's in there—but could I, even theoretically, give a team of experts with the means to do so the instructions to build a computer? No. But someone else knows, so I don't have the drive to learn. Why would I? Someone else knows.

I don't care, because someone else does. That's sad. I shouldn't work that way. But I'm not a computer, so I can't tell myself to work differently. Not where it matters.

What is magic? Here's what Google gets me:

noun

1. 1.
   the power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces.

Oh.

There are other definitions, of course, but those are relevant to the type of magic that's being discussed. The key part I want to focus on is the mystery. The supernatural. It's unknown. To the average person, computers are magic, but no one cares.

Let's imagine I teleport you to a mysterious land far away, to a world the same as this except one thing. There's magic. You and your clone, who exists in this universe, swap places for a year. Now remember, everything is exactly the same, except that in your clone's world, you can carve special mathematical formulae onto any surface, and as long as the engraver is within arm's reach of said surface, the formulae you carved out will just...happen, taking a proportional amount of energy from you as it works, and only having an effect within an arm's length of you.

That's SO COOL

That's SO COOL that I can't be bothered to use italics instead of capitals and punctuation doesn't matter because it's just SO COOL I mean think about it isn't that AWESOME?!!?!?!?

But...is it? If you know how to use even something as basic as Python, you theoretically have the ability to create worlds. They're worlds with resource limits based on the hardware they're run on, but they're entire worlds that you can realize as fully as you can describe. If you can imagine it, you can create it. You can interact with other people's worlds, join them, fight wars in them, coordinate, betray; do anything, really. Is that ALL CAPS no punctuation AWESOME?!?!?!?!?!?

No, that's just Halo.

We're in your clone's world. You look around on that world's internet, and discover that while Google will get you formulae, and that there are guides on how to construct your own, you can't just...download it on to your brain. And you discover an even more incredible fact: about 99% of the population has no idea how the magic works, despite Google having the basics of it right there. When you go through a few forums, pretending to be a native and saying things such as, "so I noticed magic exists...how come no one uses it?" You get answers like, "oh you need to take a few magic classes, and it takes a few years to learn more than the basics depending on what type of magic you want to use, and memorizing a ton of formulas is pretty boring when it gets down to it." Which you can get, sure, but it's MAGIC and that's SO COOL so why don't people just take a few years to learn it? It's not like the wizards in fantasy books, where you have to study it your whole like and live in a tower, so why not learn?

Desperate to find a real answer, you go across a few more message boards dedicated to magic, and find that there's a portion of the magic-using population that does use some of the more advanced stuff, but only grasps the basics. They get how to trigger a formulae sequence, and how to copy sequences down, but they don't get how to work. They're the "script kiddies," the types of "hackers" we get in the Minecrafts of our universe.

Would you learn magic, if you knew it wouldn't work in your world after the year was up?

What if you were a native? Can you be completely honest with yourself and say that yes, born into this world, where it seems as normal as a laptop, you would learn how to take it apart and really understand stuff like this?

I cracked open that computer's case, and I found magic.

This, I think, is the answer to the question everyone wants to ask their favorite author: "Where do your ideas come from?"

What gets you excited? When I held that mysterious device, thoughts went through my head. They flashed through so fast that I'm sure I only consciously noticed a fraction, and of that fraction I know I've forgotten most.

But when I held that relic, it was a waterlogged device of an older age, found in a city submerged long ago. When I got back to my lab, I was going to study what resembled an ancient holosphere and find the secrets of a civilization that managed to live underwater instead of floating around the world in the worldships that were my home. I was going to discover how a world managed to create shields to keep such massive amounts of water out, and I was going to discover how their shields collapsed.

When I held that device, I realized I'd made my worst mistake—and possibly my last. The glowing hunk of metal and wires flickered, and parts spun. I dropped it as parts of the crashlanded alien ship twitched around me. I lit my horn and sent a single pulse, and hoped command would catch my signal and teleport me out before it was too late. And I hoped I hadn't just awoken the worst threat Equestria had ever faced.

When I touched that crystal, it was Sombra's horn. My mechanical creation had failed again, its feeble A.I. leading to its destruction. I shook my head as I tucked the machine into a pouch. It would regrow in a few months. This time, I would make sure I built some sort of remote retrieval system into it. That mare had been so close to taking it. The sparking gears on my flanks gave me flashes of intuition and bits of insight for version 4.0 as I strode back to my laboratory, ignoring the devastation around me.

When I found the twisted amulet, I flew. Wings pumped behind me with an instinct I'd never possessed, and I laughed in the wind. The legends were right. Wings. I glanced up. And a horn. With this, we could all take to the skies and power the celestial bodies. Nopony would ever have to turn a hoof against each other. I headed back to the ground, where my sister watched me in awe. Luna took it next. Discord was the third.

Crossposted to The Writer's Group.