--- date: 2022-10-31 title: Ubiquitous, Mundane Magic --- I've been thinking again lately about how we live in a world with ubiquitous, mundane magic. We harness lightning in intricate tiny structures made of sand and metal to make them think, keeping their own internal time using perfectly beating hearts made of crystals, sustaining themselves with energy sacs made of solid metallic acid, communicating to other thinking structures using meshes of invisible light all around us. We learn how to harness and direct the thoughts of these structures in school-how to make them think more quickly, or more creatively, or more aesthetically and approachably for those not familiar with the arcane, inscrutable languages used to form those thought-directing spells. We carry opaque slabs of inorganic materials in our pockets, capable of near instantaneous communication across the entire world, able to tell us our precise positions on the planet with the aid of artificial stars we've placed up in the sky with precisely manufactured atomic hearts that we've calibrated to accommodate for the measurable difference in the speed of time between what we experience on the ground and what they experience from their places in the sky, not to mention any of the other hundreds, thousands, millions of things the slabs can do.