The invention of the transistor redefined haruspicy. It's a lot cleaner now.
Electrospex
Authors: DrGrimoire
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Chanting in a language not meant for human tongues, Zoe Pierce raises the secespita above her sacrifice, cocooned before her in a web of ritually-purified copper. The scent of ozone fills the air as the dagger begins to crackle with imprisoned lightning, fifty thousand volts charging the blade from tip to tang.
As her chant reaches a crescendo, the mage plunges the knife into her sacrifice, tearing through the polymer skin and aluminum bones of the sacrificial laptop, electricity arcing and sparking across terminals and along circuit traces. With a pop and the distinct smell of burnt plastic and vaporized heavy metals, a capacitor fails, then another and another.
A moment passes in agonized concentration as Zoe channels the force of the heavens through silicon and semiconductor, electricity forced to trace the long path from source to sink. The point of her blade extends into fractals of energy, destroying circuit and data and information. The force of her will creates a vacuum in the present, a black hole begrudgingly backfilled by the future. For an infinitesimal moment, her mind is a lightning rod, catalyzing possibility into prophecy, crystallizing what will be from what might be.
Ritual geometry strains as causality flows backwards around her, backlash un-burning candles and scouring the shadowy room with actinic hues. Under the weight of infinite possibility, resistors and transistors melt to slag. Precision crystal oscillators lose time and crack under the transition from certain to uncertain time, binary information becomes fluid, neither one nor zero.
The sanctified capacitor in the hilt of Zoe's knife finishes discharging, and all goes still. Time flows forward, candles bursting back into flame from latent heat.
The haruspex takes a moment to ground herself, tethering her consciousness to the faraday cage that insulates her sanctum from the world. Electrons jump across imaginary channels, defying Einstein even as they salute Heisenberg. Fifth-dimensional static shock passes across the surgically-implanted copper mesh around her heart, missing her pacemaker before earthing itself along the wire running down her right leg.
Grabbing the sacrifice, the technomancer makes her way to the door of her sanctum, flicking out the lights as she ascends the stairs to the repair floor. She deposits the still-smoking wreck on an open bench before settling on a stool before it, plugging a charging cord into her dagger as she reaches for her other sacred implements.
With screwdriver and scalpel, she pries open melted plastic shell to reveal the ruin of the laptop's electronic guts. A constellation of charred capacitors and ruined resistors unveils itself on the motherboard, while Lichtenburg burns trace destiny across the graphics card. With all the reverence of a Roman priestess, she lifts the components from the corpse, taking pictures where her Etruscan predecessors would carve diagrams into stone.
Her sacrifice dissected, she begins the real work, unravelling the future from electronic omen and silicon prophecy.
"Looking over the motherboard, you can see here, here, and here where tantalum capacitors blew." Zoe explains to her client, a military-looking man who claims to work for a university, though he will not say which. "But if you look here, the ceramic capacitors are fine. That's typically an omen of upheaval, the weak overcoming the strong."
"So what does that mean for me?" interrupts the alleged academic. "I was promised you could give me more than just cliché and platitudes."
"I'm getting to that." Zoe sighs. "Given that all of these components are connected to a decoder, which combines many lines into one, I would interpret that to mean that the underdog comes out on top. If you're facing a rival in the near future, I'd encourage you to consider your position. Don't underestimate them if you consider them to be weak, and don't underestimate yourself if you consider them to be strong."
"So nothing more specific? No names or details?" her client rumbles.
"Not exactly, no. However, I can tell you that it's someone that you know well, probably the first thing that popped into your head when I said the word rival. Look at this flash chip — it's a type of memory storage that is used to access things quickly. It popped right off of the board without being damaged at all. That's an indication that you're dealing with something that you think of often, probably your main concern. And if you take that with the fact that the screen connector melted, it means that this foe is going to come at you from a blind spot — I'd imagine wherever you think you're strongest."
"That's… actually pretty helpful." He admits. "Anything else?"
"Not unless you're interested in when the next earthquake is going to hit LA." She replies.
"What?"
"Sometimes when you do this kind of haruspicy, you pick up on big events from the future, the kind that can't be changed. This laptop's CPU was designed in California, and there's scorch marks between the place of manufacture and digits in the serial number. I've seen it before, that's where the next quake is." She explains.
"So you know that, and you don't tell anyone?" Her client asks, incensed. "You could save lives."
"What makes you think I haven't? The first time I got an omen like that, I called the UIU, told them that LA was about to be hit by a quake and that they had to do something. The next day, San Francisco gets hit by a magnitude 2.4. I think it knocked some paintings off of walls." She explains. "I learned pretty quickly that there's a big difference between mystically significant and actually significant. Besides, if it were a big quake, it'd have completely cracked the CPU. This is just trivia."
"Oh." He says, chagrined.
"Anyway, that's all I can tell you. Do you want to take the boards with you, or should I keep them?"
"I'll take them. Can you write down what you told me, by the way?" The man asks.
As Zoe moves to bag the circuit boards, she replies "Of course. I've already sent a copy of my augury to the email you gave me, and there's a printed copy in the envelope, along with a copy of the invoice."
"Thank you." He replies as she hands him a box containing his sacrifice and a thick manila envelope.
"Pleasure doing business with you! Come back to Electrospex the next time you need to know your fate!" She entreats as he stands and leaves, the doorbell chiming as he pushes the door open and braces himself against the Portlands rain.