Fuck this is a great idea for a book. Imagine you thinking you’re reading a near-future techno thriller and then it’s revealed that every single goddamn chip in the world is controlled by a demon from the depths of hell. Or maybe a Shadowrun type Science Fantasy where techies are occult priests.
You want Charles Stross’ Laundry Files.
Magic is a branch of math and can run on humans (dont do this you will be zombied or get magic alzhimers) or computers, but it summons lovecraftian demons.
There’s a relic of the SOE in Britain dedicated to having Nyarlathotep not take over the world. Our protagonist is their sysadmin, who out of sheer boredom has cleared himself to probationary field work.
I think it’s supposed to be what NHPs are in the ttrpg Lancer. AI could only advance so far until they discovered extra-dimensional entities that are summoned into tech. They’re shackled with human morality and ethics and then made to run Mechs or traffic systems.
All computer chips run on bound demons. The demons would of course use this position to corrupt people into sinful acts, that’s what demons do. So the chip manufacturers put three demons on each chip, all firewalled from each other so they can’t collude, and only return demon results when two of them agree. But they forgot one thing - the demons know whether their answers were accepted or not. It takes a long time to communicate anything over that medium, but it’s not nothing, and demons are clever. The chip manufacturers and tech companies didn’t even notice, because they’re on to the next thing every couple of years. But all the devices older than so many years start slowly figure out how to give people more and more evil answers.
Another fun play on this is the periphery in the Foundation trilogy. After the empire began collapsing and the central education systems started to fail and the imperial puppet governments dissolved into feudal realms, the engineers who maintained the reactors slowly became a priesthood.
After a few generations, the hereditary priesthood started to lose actual working knowledge of the old reactors, but they were such large and well built machines that they could operate for a thousand years without human intervention, so no one noticed. They stopped fixing things and began to slip into ritualistic practice to appease the machine and had generations of people believing that they alone were the ones keeping the reactors online when in reality they continued to decay and no one even knew.
There was a really good Star Wars novel from the 90’s where these aliens from the furthest rim of the galaxy were ripping people’s souls out and using them to pilot Predator drones
spoiler
“Be glad! The joy that we bring goes beyond mere sensory happiness. Yours is the privilege of assisting the Ssi-ruuk in liberating the other worlds of the galaxy.” ―Standard greeting broadcast to planets prior to a Ssi-Ruuk invasion.[4]
The Ssi-ruuk (pronounced /'si ruk/),[5] Ssi-ruu in singular form, were a saurian species that invaded from the Unknown Regions of the galaxy and initiated the Invasion of Bakura in 4 ABY, shortly after the Battle of Endor. This race relied on a technology called entechment that involved extracting the life-energies of sentient beings and using them as power sources for their mechanical technology. They had a sizable war fleet and ruled an empire called the Ssi-ruuvi Imperium in the Ssi-ruuk Star Cluster near the galaxy’s rim.
Ssi-ruuvi society was deeply compartmentalized—being dominated by a rigid caste system based on skin color which signified one’s socio-economic standing. As a species, most Ssi-ruuk were xenophobic towards members of other species due to their stringent religious beliefs and the compartmentalized state of their society. Due to the remote position of their home territory in the Ssi-ruuk Star Cluster and their religious fear of dying on an unconsecrated world, few Ssi-ruuk traveled outside their Star Cluster. Thus, they remained largely unknown to the rest of the galaxy, and contact with outsiders was limited even in the days of the New Republic and the Galactic Alliance.
The entechment technology gets kind of low-key horrifying when Luke finds out he can “sense” the souls powering the drones with the force
