TECH AND THE TRAIN

Originally written in Early 2022.

to get into a bit of auxiliary worldbuilding.

as mentioned in the main literature, perhaps the biggest application of magic is for transport. planes and cars and whatever have been rendered obsolete in favour of railways, whether relegated to inside of a country or between multiple. these magical metros/trains/whatever are artificially sped up and to give perspective to how quickly they can move, you can basically travel from one point to around the whole globe and back in about two hours. as a result travelling for pleasure and also in search of new residence is exceptionally common and immigration’s become far more streamlined and convenient as a process. additionally the railway’s fully free and doesn’t require any sort of payment to use.

beyond that there’s also notable medical/cosmetic applications, there’s various studies investigating how magic can affect chemical reactions and whatever, dimensional magic is something thats being studied… little of that is relevant to detail. what is however is magic as a network.

as a shorthand for any sort of intelligent device running on magic, ‘tech’ is the most frequently used word. ‘computer’ in general refers to doylist modern technology, which is considered analogue and novel more than anything else… it’s not a term ever used for magic-based devices.

on a general level there’s been a long-standing division between leisure technology and scientific technology. boiled down to the essentials, scientific tech is all interfaces for programming and it’s usually reserved for professionals and enthusiasts, leisure tech is more widespread but functionally limited and simplified tech. as an imperfect allegory scientific tech is equivalent to pcs and leisure to phones mp3 players etc. scientific tech has a much deeper focus on raw programming which alienates the everyman, it’s way more specialised and not necessarily expensive but… more obscure and difficult to attain.

on a visual design level, the way leisure tech looks is just as variable as any other kind of ‘accessory’. some people walk around with devices reminiscent of clunky early 2000s phones, others wear small rings that can produce bigger screen holograms when pressed, etc. currently flip phone style tech is the most ‘fashionable’ but again since everyone kind of does their own thing in this world it’s not like it’s the most common. in spite of all the variation possible, most tech is compatible together since what’s really important is the so-called ‘operating system’ within it. since it’s based on magic it can update instantly whenever, though there’s intentionally a lot of customisation options available that can basically let people use older versions of the system without problem. all these updates are managed by some sort of group somewhere it really doesn’t matter. this shit is all just ‘computer but magic and in the future’ you get it.

the internet as a construct has been replaced by the worldwide magic network ‘tessellis’ which… is basically the internet still, but remarkably less bloated with Modern Internet Stuff. from the very start of its conception tessellis was designed with overall anonymity and obfuscation in mind so despite its overwhelming radius it’s still regarded as fairly reliable and private. it’s very much a web 1/early 2000s web sorta arrangement where it simply expanded and never really evolved into centralised bullshit

the current trend with social media is something reminiscent of early web design and so there’s a focus on customisation on most sites. in particular its trendy when sites have options for various media displays and, most novelly, when kinesthetics than can be used — stuff like invoking smells or sounds is regarded as exceptionally quaint. though a good amount of the general population have taken up very basic code for the express purpose of this customisation most people just use wysiwyg drag and drop sort of tools to arrange their profiles. 

it’s also common for people to run their own private communities/in general gravitate to more obscure networks once old ones get too busy… people do get kinda snooty about their hangouts remaining underground and obscure lol. the most famous general site that’s thrived regardless of its userbase is whitenoise which is basically an extensive forum with geocities style customisation for profiles and options to set up private forums where only a whitelisted group of users can post. relevant to the story is subwoofer which is a much more traditional forum specifically made to host discussion about programming, whether with regards to ongoing projects done by professionals or for enthusiasts to share their discoveries.

for a quick tangential paragraph. i’ll say an important thing to note is that english has remained like, The language of tessellis and so in general fluency in english is commonplace regardless of where someone’s from. even if someone’s not really tech savvy wrt social media, since magic networks are responsible for a lot of travel infrastructure it’s still something informally picked up by many. while i’m on the topic of language i’ll also say a lot of dead/near-extinct languages got ‘revived’ over the years and currently hold healthy populations of speakers. and even more generally, it’s nearly impossible to find someone who isn’t at least bilingual if not extensively a polyglot — the amount of languages the average person is fluent in is 3. entirely the result of travelling being made easier, tessellis harbouring extensive dictionaries and resources that make learning languages easier, the spread of magic in general making it easier to teach languages locally etc. this multilingualism has only been growing as a result of magic research and efforts to understand it, and most of these projects being international.

anyway. to express how any of the past few paragraphs are relevant to fornax, broadly…

on the train tessellis still kind of works, but every webpage loaded is kind of an archive of itself and naturally no communication options on anything work. even prior to mazin’s disruption of the control room i think communication outside of contact with the scientists was limited, mostly to keep the fornax journey somewhat ‘exclusive’ and to attract new volunteers. hence tessellis on the train is basically frozen in time to the date of fornax ii’s launch and webpages newer than that haven’t been moved over to it… as a result of this vacancy a lot of passengers have found intrigue in investigating even older media such as dvds and vhs tapes, to a degree far higher than any other archivists on earth, honestly.

back to linguistics for a second before i dive into story stuff. english is also the predominant language spoken on the train, naturally. obviously as a result of case-by-case familiarity there’s been a spread of passengers teaching one another their native languages and occasionally certain foreign phrases catching on as proper terms for train phenomena — most prominent example is ulises titling each octant with a number in nahuatl and those just becoming the proper names everyone uses for them. other than english i’d say the most consistent languages known on the train are french and spanish but that’s more just happenstance than a case of ‘this is what everyone uses all the time intentionally’. another thing to mention is that because fornax is a closed environment with a limited number of people in it, a lot of people have developed weird tonal mannerisms and accent aberrations just by rubbing off on one another haha. it’s more of a meta mood thing honestly but it’s also probably why everyone talks in weird overprecise flowery monologues. 

regardless.

initially the way communication with fornax scientists worked was through a private magic channel made to resist interdimensional travel — though not the first of its kind it was probably the strongest and most robust. the control room held a series of both text-based interfaces and audio/visual ones, operating on the idea that a scientist would always be on deck to respond to any issues or complaints or whatever. this did work for fornax i, and would’ve also functioned for its successor but the way mazin messed with the tech resulted in a full sever of the channel on the fornax end. evidently this just killed the arrangement as a whole.

the most automated elements of fornax were the object-pullers, which honestly… don’t so much operate on a solid magic connection as they do on small, looping bits of code. to express what that means, object-pullers were made by combining code for ‘infinite rooms’, starting off with a slightly-filled-in template of an object database, and feeding those two scripts to fornax itself. fornax expanded the database into an even longer (as in uncountable LOL) list which happened to coincide with basically every object on earth ever, whether of the past or of current times. there’s also an element of object-pullers looking into people’s memories to discern any unmentioned specifics for requested objects but that was never an intentionally coded part and seems to be something wholly caused by fornax.

which leads me into describing the way the fornax reality operates… it’s basically a very abstract sort of code that recognises magic and can work with it, though it’s practically impossible to decrypt and control. at least, at the stage of development magic is in right now. overall it’s easier to think of it as a consciousness — it’s heavily familiar with earth and any sort of objects or matter originating from it, it facilitates human life (albeit necessitating some mental fortitude), it responds to human thought very accurately even if distinct commands were left vague… which of course has begged the question of whether the reality could somehow hold a full conversation. this is practically the lead-into for both cassiopeia and hydra which i’ll go into LATER again LOL

regardless the principle things to keep in mind are that fornax is omniscient, responsive, abstract and apparently untameable.

another notable thing is the actual fornax database for passengers! it’s most directly hosted on the train itself and then a copy is sent out to the fornax scientists back on earth — curiously enough, perhaps because the hub of this system is hosted within autumn instead of the control room, it still functions perfectly. tragically it lacks any capacity for communication and is mostly ignored by both train residents and the scientists. anyway what it is is a display of every passenger’s name, their train title, and auxiliary information garnered from the initial boarding process. it truly is somewhat useless unless someone needs to consult someone’s train title.

train titles are also kind of useless in themself. they’re effectively a code name given to a new passenger once they connect to the rest of the train specifically to identify them as a subject (which is only ever relevant to the scientists) and occasionally, by systems on the train such as the elevator. titles are never really used as personal pseudonyms, barring acute exceptions like mazin and isel.

the way train rooms work is also kind of irrelevant, i’ve explained it a bit in the images on the ‘setting’ character but the most important thing is the interface for furnishing and ‘room layout’. it’s basically just a sandbox design simulator that functions with the same logic that object-pullers have, just in a more precise manner. it’s literally just like “heres a little screen that can be summoned on the surface of your door, make up a little plan of a room as if it’s a video game and everything you put down will also be summoned and automatically arranged the same way in real life”. it’s very customisable. blah blah.

as a final non sequitur i’ll say the general look of hardware for tech on the train varies — the control room strongly follows the clunky 1970s-1980s computer/general electronics look, as do the automated screens in autumn. otherwise individual object-pullers in rooms are up to whoever owns the room itself. the evoker is somewhat of an exception since it’s a communal object-puller — it is just an orb. who knows what visual style that corresponds to.