The public on both sides of the Horizon would be surprised to learn that the Noir Scape’s militarized and intelligence-collecting organizations actually make extensive use of computers like their Austral counterparts, along with many key industrial players. The practice of technological stagnation in the Noir Scape was originally imposed to block Austral manipulation – normally, the Unity uses its superior medical and agri/aquacultural technology to recruit from foreign populations until they are fully assimilated, with only deniable ‘extremists’ like the Auravelus resorting to direct violence, furthermore subverting their targets with electronic donations. Rejecting Austral electronics/photonics offered short-term protection against surveillance through these devices, but in the long term the Noir Scape has found computers to be unavoidable.  

These computers can be of practically any design that is not electronic or photonic, presumed to make them safe from remote discovery or manipulation. When they are too big to be concealed they are generally disguised.

Looms

Tension supercomputers are normally called ‘looms’ in code, and they are normally disguised as looms and stored inside textile manufacturing centers. Messages are conducted by forces applied through threads, wires and belts; values are imputed by attaching or removing weights or turning cranks. Most in the Austral Unity have little to no understanding of such antiquated things as looms or stringed instruments, and even their computer engineers would be unlikely to recognize a tension computer for what it is.

To be complex enough to yield economically significant computational results, tension supercomputers must generally be large, consisting of at least 10-100 thousand strings (or equivalent). It must therefore be possible to walk or crawl inside them to conduct repairs or modifications, and it might take many years for their inventor to train an apprentice. The first practical ‘loom’ was invented by a Larch native named Connor Tors, a man with the unique Larch feature of controlled savantism. He was employed clandestinely by the Noir Scape, and his creation was enhanced by generations of his descendants, notably his granddaughter Berit Tors*.

*Larch natives generally take their ‘favorite’ choice of surname from their extended family when they come of age, which is sometimes grounds for considerable animosity between family-members. New surnames may be invented to avoid serious feuds.

Turing vats

Turing vats are chemical computing elements: they can be shrunk for speed, or made huge to allow for considerable parallelism. When they are large they can be concealed in many industrial environments, such as fertilizer factories or water treatment centers, although in modern times the ‘vat’ can contain mere millilitres of liquid, small enough to be wearable.

They use non-equilibrium, oscillating chemical reactions to produce fronts of changing composition that resemble cellular automata, amounting to logic gates that can perform complex calculations. However, a full comprehension of how they work is generally even harder to achieve than understanding of the ‘loom’ tension supercomputer. The Noir Scape can boast that these computers were invented by one of their own geniuses** rather than a Larch savant, though Larch savants did significantly improve the design over the years. 

The original recipes were very poisonous, including cyanide, and they could be ‘scrambled’ if they were shaken sufficiently; increasing the recipe’s viscosity better retains data at the price of lower computations speed. Faster Turing vats incorporating electrophoresis and electro-osmosis with increasingly microscopic components (Mewis tubes) are approaching the performance of slower electronic devices.  

**Alan Turing, in the Noir Scape timeline, seems to have died after 1980 (Gregorian); in Austral history, he is believed to have committed suicide by poisoned apple decades earlier. The Noir Turing was forcibly kept alive by stomach pumping to continue his essential work and disappeared from public life by early Skeptics.

Waterworks

A ‘waterwork’ is Noir code for a computer with hydraulic logic components, with the working fluid almost always being water. Some waterworks incorporate steam in their functioning, accelerating computation and being coded as ‘bubblers’; the most powerful waterworks (made by clandestine partnership with Australs in light of newer threats) incorporate advanced material science to permit the use of supercritical water, being general fluidic computers rather than strictly hydraulic. Chemo-fluidic computation seems to be in an exploratory stage by several Noir schools.