The time of a single witch or wizard trying to snare death in their dying spell was over a decade ago. Such techniques could only be used by a skilled witch or wizard upon their deaths, and such events were hard to plan for ethically.
Now a team of thaumotological engineers laboured over a contrivance of electronics and crystals. This device would be slid under a bed of a terminally ill patient. Slotted into the centre were a handful of cells in a dish, taken from the dying patient themselves.Theoretical research had been done, software had been written hundreds of different strategies and counter strategies had been tested in simulations. Death was far faster than any human, but the right engineering could be faster than death.
If you had walked through the corridor of the Royal Infirmary, you would have seen very little out of place compared to a normal hospital. One dying patient had slightly more sensors on their body than usual, the wires running under the bed. Small puffs of cool cloud flowed out one side of the bed as nitrogen gas was vented from the cooling system.
Death approached the bed. They felt a brief disorienting pulse of magic, just enough to throw them off balance for a few seconds. Shaking his head at the crudeness of the supposed trap, death claimed another soul.
Half an hour later, a man arrived at the hospital. He slid the box out from under the bed. Opening the top, he observed the contents. Most of the box was full of slag, solidified but still hot. In one insulated corner is an SSD chip full of encrypted data. The password, 100KB of quantum randomness unique to this particular box and stored offsite. He plugs the SSD chip into his laptop and uploads the data back to the main control room. They have significantly improved their sensors from last time and have several gigs of new scans and telemetry.
Nice! In many ways, a very different style to what I wrote, but I like to think it shares something of the same spirit (perhaps representing something of a logical next step).
The time of a single witch or wizard trying to snare death in their dying spell was over a decade ago. Such techniques could only be used by a skilled witch or wizard upon their deaths, and such events were hard to plan for ethically.
Now a team of thaumotological engineers laboured over a contrivance of electronics and crystals. This device would be slid under a bed of a terminally ill patient. Slotted into the centre were a handful of cells in a dish, taken from the dying patient themselves.Theoretical research had been done, software had been written hundreds of different strategies and counter strategies had been tested in simulations. Death was far faster than any human, but the right engineering could be faster than death.
If you had walked through the corridor of the Royal Infirmary, you would have seen very little out of place compared to a normal hospital. One dying patient had slightly more sensors on their body than usual, the wires running under the bed. Small puffs of cool cloud flowed out one side of the bed as nitrogen gas was vented from the cooling system.
Death approached the bed. They felt a brief disorienting pulse of magic, just enough to throw them off balance for a few seconds. Shaking his head at the crudeness of the supposed trap, death claimed another soul.
Half an hour later, a man arrived at the hospital. He slid the box out from under the bed. Opening the top, he observed the contents. Most of the box was full of slag, solidified but still hot. In one insulated corner is an SSD chip full of encrypted data. The password, 100KB of quantum randomness unique to this particular box and stored offsite. He plugs the SSD chip into his laptop and uploads the data back to the main control room. They have significantly improved their sensors from last time and have several gigs of new scans and telemetry.
Nice! In many ways, a very different style to what I wrote, but I like to think it shares something of the same spirit (perhaps representing something of a logical next step).