As mentioned elsewhere, Trinary computers have been specially designed, built, and programmed through Enlightened hypertech. Processing a broader band of information and work­ ing with “yes /no /maybe /and /or” protocols, such machines have far greater capacities than normal, real world computer systems. Technically, the current state-of-the-art Trinary com­ puters are actually Quinary computers, but that name has not yet caught on among the elite. Even futurists have a soft spot for certain traditions.

In story terms, such systems have been around for several decades, and they’ve become the default computer gear for Awakened technomancers from many different groups. That said, Trinary systems are still rare, expensive, precious, more challenging to use than normal systems, and exceedingly effective at mundane tasks as well as magickal ones. Imagine them as the IT equivalent of a high-end sports car: available if you’ve got the right money and connections, but not easy to use unless you know what you’re doing with one.

Trinary gear used to be the sole province of Virtual Adepts, who treated such machines as marks of elite status within their Tradition. That technology, however, eventually slid out into the technomancer mainstream… partly through trade and sharing, partly through theft and gear acquired from dead or converted Adepts, and partly through innovations by Iteration X and other computer-using mages among various groups.

In game terms, a Trinary computer gives bonuses to its user, inflicts penalties upon anyone unfortunate enough to go up against someone using one (unless he’s got his own Trinary system), and makes certain things possible that a normal computer just can’t do. As the Computer Systems sidebar shows, a character using a Trinary computer system reduces her difficulties by -2 when she’s going up against mundane computer systems. The Trinary system also reduces the time it takes to hack such mundane systems by roughly two hours. On the flipside, a hacker who’s trying to access and alter a system that has one or more Trinary computers involved adds +2 to her difficulties and adds at least two hours to the work time if she’s using non-Trinary gear. (Two Trinary systems cancel out those benefits and penalties if they go up against one another.)

When focusing magickal Effects, too, a Trinary computer makes certain feats possible. As mentioned above, high-level computer magick is still impossible on a typical computer system; such machines, even now, can’t handle the raw amounts of power and bandwidth required for sophisticated technomagick. Assume, then, that a magickal Effect that in­ volves Spheres 4 or 5 can be performed only with a Trinary computer system.