For centuries, the use of magic followed a familiar pattern. A mage concentrated aether from their surroundings into a focus object, then used practiced meditative techniques to visualize a pattern for the aether to assume when released into the world, constituting a “spell”. The miraculous capabilities of spellcasting kept mages in constant demand, but the need for years of study, consecrated implements, and hours of quietude cemented it as skilled work necessarily supported by entire communities. It took a village to maintain a mage: they had no time to sow or reap, so their neighbours kept them fed, clothed, and sheltered in exchange for blessing the crops, healing the sick, and giving timely warnings of future catastrophe.
Then a clever mage invented the condenser. A vacuum-filled cylinder of glass and metal into which aether naturally collected over time, charging it with a cold blue glow. The device replicated the previously laborious, delicate task of accumulating energy with a relatively simple inanimate assembly. While this device alone held the potential to revolutionize the field of magic, the discovery that a purely material construct could channel aether provoked the swift creation of vacuum tube diodes, resistors, and inductors. Each of these new components manipulated aetheric flow in a distinct manner and, when linked together in something called a “circuit”, released the stored esoteric energy in a controllable pattern: that is to say, cast a spell.
From this point in history, one can imagine a future of radical freedom. An aether machine could cast any spell a mage could, but at the mere push of a button. Once established at an economy of scale, such devices could magically create virtually limitless food and clean water. They could reshape the earth into houses, light the streets, and regenerate the bodies of the wounded. The shackles of scarcity thus broken, human beings could live lives of art, leisure, and self-actualization rather than break their backs with toil. A utopia of plenty for all.
But history curved in a different direction. The wealthy patrons of the mage engineers who created this new technology saw it as a means to further enrich themselves rather than lift everyone up to their level. They employed the occult appliances to deliver good and services, certainly: but for a price. A price calculatedly just low enough to undercut the standard rates of traditional mages, forcing them to undervalue their work to compete. With more and more of them driven into poverty, the institutional knowledge of their profession withered as many left the field without training apprentices. Their competition thus driven out, those in control of aether circuit manufacture could freely raise their own prices to whatever they wished.
The economic shift did not spare the rest of the labor market, either. Mechanical spellcasting gradually eliminated the jobs of farmers, smiths, physicians, and anyone else who once delivered a service now done by automatic magic: which, in time, included all services. Only a tiny cadre of jobs remained for the sake of operating and maintaining the aether machines, and as the years passed new designs further automated the process, whittling away the need for even technicians. Unemployment spiked to unprecedented heights, and all wealth flowed toward the top. By the end of the next few decades half a percent of the population controlled virtually all production. With their bargaining power reduced to nothing, the remaining population resigned themselves to offering up their own flesh, dreams, or worse as grist for the mills in exchange for bare subsistence.
Meanwhile the new aristocracy squatted on mountains of gold like dragons, peering with paranoia at both the teeming underclass and their scheming peers. They raised up high towers, island fortresses, and castles floating in the sky to protect themselves from assassination attempts, while unnaturally prolonging their lives with alchemic anti-senescents and transhuman augmentation. They quarrelled with one another, waging private wars and scorching wide swathes of the land with strategic-scale spell arrays. Ultimately, they carved up the planet into fiefdoms surrounding their individual citadels, supplanting all existing governments with their own eccentric brands of sovereignty. The age of magitechnological tyrants began.
You were born into this world. Its tyranny is normal to you. Yet you know from whispered stories and banned books that it was not always this way, and it need not remain so. The people no longer have anything to lose. You can sense it in the air.
Revolution is coming.
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