#technosorcery

The two main ideas of techno-sorcery that I have come up with are wires and circuits arranged into glyphs (glyphs usually need some form of magical power such as blood or ba applied to them in order to activate. Turns out running electricity through them works just as well) and that a computer repeatedly reading a file can take the place of actually speaking the incantations. (Those files are typically in a digitization of heiratic text, so everyone else is convinced they are either complete genius or complete gibberish)

If pressed on a given thing he could probably realize why it violates our current understanding of physics. Like he is scientifically literate. Its just normally his subconscious is like ‘yep, checks out’ so most of the time he doesn’t even notice to begin thinking about it. On top of that, he has pieces of magical understanding that have bubbled up in the back of his brain and in the  process get reframed in more scientific terms (especially once he sits down and tries to write this shit up for the patent), so he would have to realize that he actually hadn’t heard those ideas from somewhere else

But it works dammit, there has to be an explanation.

That said, upon the release of the holograms, the scientific community flipped the fuck out and got really excited. Holy shit! How does this stuff work? It could totally revolutionize our understanding of light, of everything. Can we get our hands on it and play? 

Kaiba’s a little nervous because trade secrets and all, but he also loves the attention. So he does invite some scientists and outside engineers over, it just has to be at his facilities on his terms. The release of duel disks makes this slightly less of an issue because the scientists could just buy one, but they are expensive and the stuff at his facilities can be specifically set up to run a given experiments.

They are still really confused why the holograms from the cards are always such better quality than holograms attempted for unrelated things. Like we know you’re really into card games Kaiba, but this is a bit extreme.

Its cause the cards actually contain (or contain links to) ka’s, and he has another program to access and scan them, so of course if you start out with a lot of information about what your trying to project you get a better result than if you start from scratch. [Holograms, even cruder ones, are too profitable however for him not to write a program so that they can be used in other areas]

Pegasus figured out what was going on fairly quick and decided to roll with it and corroborate Kaiba’s story. That said, when Kaiba first approached him about duel box’s/arenas (depending on continuity), he talked so confidently about the whole mess, that Pegasus almost became convinced himself that he had put computer chips in the cards, especially because upon a mind scan Kaiba so thoroughly believed it. However, reminding himself that no, he did not put computer chips in, he realized that he caught glimpses of less mundane things floating through Kaiba’s mind. It might have actually freaked him out a little bit. 

So long as you avoid mentioning magic and use more scientific-sounding phrases you could have a decent conversation with him about techno-sorcery (or as decent as any conversation with him goes), especially later on as he’s perfected duel disks and generally his craft. He’d actually be a little excited because after talking with so many engineers and scientists who were scratching their heads, here’s finally someone who gets it.

In both of these instances, the holograms acted more solid than they should if they were literally made of light (Solid Vision is a good name for this tech) with no magical enhancements. My guess is that the strength of the hologram and its ability to manipulate the physical world is partially in proportion to the strength of the Ka depicted. The idea behind this would be that an image sufficient in detail and spirit to the thing depicted is almost the thing itself; basically, the image is itself a conduit through with the power flows.

For Ka’s with immeasurable strength such as the god cards this would start to seep through with any depiction, which is what we see of people dying while working with photographs of carvings of the god cards. That said, most Ka’s need a more stable link with this world to begin. Pegasus’s paintings on the cards are the first step in this, sufficiently detailed and through his artistic eye sufficiently in spirit, that they form a link with the depicted Ka. Through this link they could already be used in shadow games such as that played first played between Kaiba and Yami in the manga. The link also provided enough of a hold for Kaiba’s tech to then scan the Ka and, with electricity rather than Ba, produce an even more detailed depiction. This allows more power to flow through. The images still aren’t solid; it's still an almost. But, things start to have effects.

This also means that Shadow Games are even more potent with Kaiba Corp tech, since you don’t have to spend the extra energy to get an illusion. You can spend that energy doing other tricks including removing the almost.

Though I’d probably be less on the engineering side and more on building up and recovering the axioms for magic by comparing ancient texts to how it works in the tech, and then reformulating the axioms in a way that can be accepted by those who don’t believe in magic (even if their acceptance involves taking it a bit more metaphorically than it actually is: “An image sufficiently detailed and true to the spirit of what it is depicting is nearly the thing itself” would be convincing as a metaphor for a company that works with holograms and VR that can cause psychosomatic damage.)

That isn’t my official job description since you know my employer doesn’t believe that there is any magic in the tech to be explained. So I have to chip in the engineering some. But, that is what my job would be in practice.

Like I already spend way too much time overanalyzing the fictional tech, so if it were no longer fictional, I’d probably do it for work. And, like learning magic!!! yay! [The major downside would be working for Kaiba.]

Also, I once had a daydream where I was hitting up one of my historian contacts, and it somehow devolved into me giving a talk about what I learned (which I titled “The Egyptian School of Magics: Applied!” and I made a snarky comment about me actually doing applied things, since in the real world I am a pure mathematician.) And it was basically an intro to techno-sorcery. And, literally the only thing that felt fake was that it was a chalk talk, cause my handwriting is shit. (Fake in the ‘that ain’t me’ sense. The magic is of course very fake)

Glyphs are far more situated in physical space and physicality and thus work better when dealing directly with the physical objects and hardware (for example, the part of the ka card scanner that latches onto the card and connects to the ka link would be located in the glyphs. Incantations, however, are closer to the gods/spirits/souls so once the connection to the ka link is established, accessing the ka would be better suited for an incantation.

Glyphs are great for connecting various broad energies/concepts and establishing a hold on them. A glyph for light is far more powerful than the incanted words for light. Moreover, glyphs can be arranged in non-linear ways that incantations cannot, so they are great for establishing overarching schema. However, incantations allow you more nuance in expression (simply by giving you a whole language where you have plenty of words and can guild meaning up over time). So once you have a hold of the energies via glyphs, you may want to direct those energies via incantation. Another reason accessing the ka is better done using incantations: You want to scan it, not attack it.

The linearity of incantations can help in turning stuff into algorithms. The spatial non-linearity of glyphs makes them great for single tasks, but incantations can put tasks into a proper order. This connects with the fact that the incantations are literally sitting in the program while glyphs are literally sitting in the hardware. In fact, I think along with the flow of energy through the wires and circuits, incantations could play a key role in controlling when glyph and glyph clusters are activated. (the electricity needs to be running to provide a source of energy, but perhaps getting the energy to go in the right direction is partly done via incantation).

Beyond incantations being better suited for turning tasks into algorithms, because they are sitting in the code, they can more directly interact with it. They can be read and activated as a part of a larger program. They can be the piece that turns the magical scanning of the ka into actual data another program can use. Moreover, glyphs sitting in the circuits and hardware are more likely to- once given instructions- actually bend the light to make a hologram.