a swimmer original fantasy setting, with non-Earth history and geopolitics.

Magic can only be accessed by running the right mental computations. Until less than a century ago, it was hard to teach and thus hard to scale. After a key invention, an arms race between the two major world powers, the Empire and the Republic, led to an arms race and very fast industrial (and computing) revolution.

(The Academy, an institution for the study of magic that has survived for thousands of years, was a neutral party. On paper.)