Technomancy

The following introduction is included in its entirety in order to give a quick referrence for readers and researchers. Links to the specifics behind each concept and law of Technomancy are provided at the bottom of the page

The highest founding law of occult theory in all universes of human and meta-human design is the Law of Correspondence. This is the model that drives occultism from all corners and shards of reality. Elven shamanic nature worship, mideaval hermetic ritual, ghoul practiced necromancy and any other school or genre of thought is guided by this principle.

Simply stated, Correspondence is the relation of a part of the universe with a unifying universal concept or, archetype. Occult theory is built around this idea that a guiding wave or urge infuses all things close to it in concept. The real meat of any true occult theory, then, is not in the robustness or power of an individual, their spells, or occult lineage but in the versatility and saturation of the ideas that they invoke. The wider and more powerful this single idea is, the more it can access and the more visible its influence on objects when they are regarded as a shadow or shard of their mother idea.

For this series of laymen's examples a Practitioner of the arts is attempting to heal a wounded sentient being of human or meta-human type. A naturalistic healer will attempt to affect change through the use of localities, remedies or procedures that are taught to be conducive to fostering life. They may administer an enchanted herbal remedy. They may put the patient to rest on or near a ley line. A necromancer may attempt to reverse the polarity of death energies, effectively creating a seal or ward that the entropic effects of death and decay will be unable to pass through.

In an until now unrelated example, a liscenced physician would fully examine the condition of the patient and attempt to use a series of immune boosters, simple physical tricks of bandaging or stitching, and antiseptics in order to urge the body to overcome its condition and heal its own wounds.

In every last one of these examples, the practitioner is using some form of the Law of Correspondence. Each is attempting to affect change on an object or system by relating it to an archetype. One Correspondence is established, the practitioner attempts to infuse or defuse that object with the archetype's influence. The forest mystic is simply attuning the wounded patient with more of the Life or Nature concept, the necromancer is de-attuning the patient with the Death concept, while the physician is attempting to reinforce the body's natural practices.

That last example is the gateway to Technomancy. Plain and simple, the development of Technomancy is the development of -- or the refining of -- a new archetype.

Put more clearly it is the birth of a new archetype by the marriage and comingling of several more established ones. To go back to the healing example and the physician; something very special is happening here: The physician is not trying to heal the patient through a unifying and ultimately disassociative process. The physician is attempting to heal the patient by reinforcing the patient's association to his or herself.

The physician sees to it that the body will function as it ought. He or she makes certain that no external factors will interfere with this and ultimately attempts to do nothing more than streamline the patient's natural healing processes. This emphasis on the material is imporatnat because it is what will eventually unlock science and turn it into Technomancy.

In an very similar paralell, engineers create simple artificial minds which function on simple concepts that, when run in tandem with other simple concepts, create effects that seem super-human. More so than in any other scientific or mystic field, engineers and programmers can see that what they are doing is merely the streamlining of a system. While they may use creative mathematics at times, the mathematic still follows a brutally precise set of laws.

What every engineer, technician and scientist then comes to see is the potential for a system to become so much more. Properly harnessed, this potential can overcome flaws and build itself to something greater. Unassisted, a body has little chance of repairing a wide gash, but through stitching the potential of doing so greatly increases. A simple wood plank may not hold up a few stone blocks, but if the wood is shaped into an arch or triangular base the potential also greatly increases.

What kept science from changing over for so many centuries was the idea that the only art was in method. For centuries the idea persisted that in this format no archetype was being invoked. The most brilliant minds of several generations were unknowingly practicing the Law of Corresponce on a tiny but dazzlingly intriguing scale. They never even thought of regarding it as such.

Married from the idea of Life, Humanity, Creativity and Order, the new archetype has arisen. It is uniquely human and is the birthright of all purely human races. It is the guiding archetype of mankind and the most famous Law of Technomancy: The Law of Emergent Potential.

Until this point, the meta-human races seemed much more powerful and mystically adept because they had early on discovered and embraced their guiding archetypes. This special archetype is the archetype that most saturates and embodies the race's psychology and physical being. Humanity remained a baseline race for so long because it rejected its guiding archetype. For centuries it attempted to either hide Emergent Potential under blankets of religion or mistake it for scientific method.

The Law of Emergent Potential is all of this and more. The law states that all things are moved by what they are or will be capable of doing. Potential guides the human race and its creations. The primary secret of potential is Focus.

Machines seem easily capable of super-human feats even though humanity created them. Why? Machines are potential focused to a careful and extremely narrow point. In the creation of a machine, a human places a shard of their own Potential into the device and denies the device even the possibility of acting outside of its focus. This maximization of the efficiency of the limited potential a human bestows creates a wholly unique effect: The machine comes to excel so greatly at its task that it appears to generate its own stores of Potential. This is the first application of the Law of Emergent Potential: the idea that Potential Focused strongly enough will come to create potentials of its own.

It wasn't merely because humans lacked the technology that they had so much trouble making an AI through science. The elementary thinking to do so just wasn't there. It was like attempting to build a cargo jet without a concept of gravity.

So a machine is a child of humankind and its birthright. A machine is potential parceled and focused on one single objective. Humans can make machines do anything. Even the meta-human races with their powerful specialised magics have difficulty accomplishing this. How is this possible? Because Emergent Potential is possibly the most versatile, all-saturating archetype ever.

As the race further awakens to Emergent Potential, machines become wonderworks of special uses. The question still remains at how a human his or herself factors into this equation. The memory and processor speed of a machine could be used as a crude measure of the machine's potential. The human mind has an imagination that seems to circumvent this measure. It could be that humans, being the children of Potential, have infinite Potential at their disposal.

So why aren't they all gods? Focus.

Infinite potential pulled in infinite direction means that humans are forever locked down into a relatively powerless basic state. Magi, adepts and technomancers trade in their versatility for focus in order to become more than human. The problem is that they lose their ability to do Anything which is the ultimate birthright of humanity.

But if some could be cultivated for exactly that purpose. . . if the Infinite Potential of the race could be Focused down to the Emergent Potential of their machines. . . if their minds, destinies and psychologies could be Focused to a narrow point. . . they could harness power unlike anything the world has ever seen.

Trading the universe for the power to uphold what is right. Trading the ability to walk free with their race for the strength and body to be humanity's avatars.

They would be the top of the hierarchy of rulers. What Plato called the Guardians.