“Everything is just data”

“Everything is just data” is both a technical proposition and a dangerous worldview in Jack Tanjihiro Chae-wong’s story. It describes the Infinity Machine’s ability to read and redistribute reality, gives Jack a way to interpret injury and disease, and supports his increasing command of systems that turn magic, bodies, and catastrophe into manipulable information. The phrase therefore marks the point where metaphysics becomes interface: what appears miraculous or sacred can be processed, altered, purged, or restored.

Origin in the Infinity Machine

The expression’s clearest theoretical explanation comes from Sahaqiel, who states that what people call mana is data. She explains that the Infinity Machine reads the molecules of matter, translates them into information, and connects the world through a vast network. Her computer analogy makes the machine a single server and router through which data moves globally. The original outbreak was likewise treated as an information problem: the machine halted the flow of mana and reversed it, drawing in a particular spectrum of data that eliminated people who possessed mana capability.

This explanation changes the meaning of magic in the setting. Mana is not presented as an immaterial force beyond analysis but as a readable flow embedded in matter and living bodies. The Infinity Machine does not merely store knowledge about the world; it participates in the circulation of the world’s physical and magical processes. Its technological infrastructure consequently becomes a material power capable of causing mass elimination as well as enabling connection.

Jack’s Practical Use of the Principle

Jack later applies the expression to his own body. While spending time with his family, he admits that smoking relieves stress and adds that, if cancer develops, he can purge the cells because everything is data. His statement is deliberately casual, but it reveals how thoroughly the machine’s logic has entered his self-understanding. Disease is no longer only a biological threat; it is corrupted or unwanted information that may be identified and removed.

The same logic underlies Jack’s broader development. After electrical energy courses across his body, the Angel System reports an increase in the Authority of Gehenna. Elsewhere, the system identifies itself as Angel System Status Level 10 and gives Jack the title Nephilim, with Regeneration and Mana Synthesis enhancements. These interfaces convert bodily transformation and supernatural capacity into visible, countable states. Growth is not only experienced; it is displayed as an update.

Corruption, Skills, and Unstable Information

The phrase also encounters its limit when Jack reaches Jill’s corrupted condition. Touching Jill’s mask produces pain and a storm of voices before she releases putrid energy, while the system displays an error warning about data corruption. The warning makes corruption legible in the system’s vocabulary, but legibility does not make the condition simple to repair. The surrounding dialogue explicitly rejects the idea that corruption can be solved merely by identifying it as data.

Jack’s response is not resignation but escalation. When he needs a power capable of saving people on the brink of destruction, the Angel System announces that a Radiant Skill has been unlocked and then makes an Anti-Army Class Skill available. The system thus turns desperation into authorization. Yet the sequence also preserves a tension between human need and procedural permission: Jack’s plea produces an answer only when the interface grants access to a new capability.

The Infinity Machine as Total Network

Near the final confrontation, Jack sees raw magical information rising from the wound beneath Adam. The black light awakens the imprisoned figure, and the twisting mana forms a whirlpool that Jack recognizes as a teleportation ability similar to Ivan Petroff’s. Information is therefore not static code. It can gather, move, imitate an ability, and alter the conditions of imprisonment. Michael’s descent into the pit confirms Jack’s theory that the process is being used to obtain what Michael believes should have belonged to him.

Inside the Infinity Machine, Lilith encounters the scale of this principle directly. Intricate lines of code stream into the machine’s funnel, while the small gray device is connected to everything: actions, reactions, changes in temperature, airflow, and other processes are funneled through its sphere. The machine’s apparent smallness contrasts with its total reach. It is not simply a tool held by an operator but an active material network whose pull can be physically felt by Lilith, even as she doubts whether touching it will be safe.

Administrator and Narrative Significance

The expression reaches its fullest consequence when Jack commands the Angel System to awaken. Golden interfaces appear before the gathered people, but Jack’s version is labeled Administrator. Selfia Cordelica recognizes its resemblance to the system and to abilities that were lost five years earlier. Jack’s body radiates a comforting warmth as the command takes effect, joining an intimate physical presence to an abstract administrative authority.

At this point, “Everything is just data” is no longer merely Sahaqiel’s account of how the Infinity Machine works or Jack’s grim joke about purging cancer. It has become the conceptual basis for a new sovereignty. Jack can read the world through system displays, receive skills as permissions, identify magical phenomena as transferable information, and activate an interface that places him above ordinary users. The phrase carries an unresolved irony: reducing reality to data makes extraordinary intervention possible, but the corrupted warning, the machine’s danger, and the suffering produced by earlier data manipulation show that information can remain opaque, violent, and resistant to control.