Techno Wizard

"We are dreamers, shapers, singers, and makers. We study the mysteries of laser and circuit, crystal and scanner, holographic demons and invocations of equations. These are the tools we employ, and we know many things."

— Elric the Technomage, Babylon 5

The Techno Wizard is the guy or girl who can make a computer or electronic device do anything.

Among other things, they know all the Omniscient Databases; they know how to use the Enhance Button and the Facial Recognition Software for the best results; they can look at a wall covered with Billions of Buttons and immediately figure out which unlabeled one is the one that turns off the Self-Destruct Mechanism; they can jury-rig an iPod into an Everything Sensor.

They may or may not be a Mad Scientist as well, depending on how fantastic the show is. They will often have Machine Empathy, especially for devices they use regularly. Expect lots of Hollywood Hacking.

Compare the Gadgeteer Genius, who is more mechanically inclined than electronically inclined, and the Technopath, who is capable of magical control over technology. Not to be confused with Magic from Technology. When genuine magic is integrated with technology, see Magitek.

Despite their names, Techno Wizards may not be able to create a Robot Wizard (robots that can actually perform wizardry).

Doesn't necessarily have to do with the music genre Techno, though in that case, you might be looking for Magic Music.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• The title character from Battle Programmer Shirase. He can take on even the most skilled and well-equipped hacker with just a cellphone.

• Although much of Section 9 from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex counts, the Laughing Man leads the pack: he can, in a matter of moments, subvert an entire crowd's cybernetic eyes and show them what he wants them to see.

• Nina from Ultra Maniac literally is a Techno Wizard because she needs to use a PC to cast spells due to her lack of skill.

Comic Books

• The DCU: Barbara Gordon is a wizard with a computer, and has acted as the Voice with an Internet Connection for teams across the DCU as Oracle, most notably the Birds of Prey. She builds her own computers, occasionally with a little help from Tim Drake, the most computer savvy of the Robins who has learned a lot from her. In her position as Oracle, she is often one of the, if not the most, powerful members of the superhero community without even leaving her carefully protected and booby-trapped clock tower.

Fan Fiction

• Power Rangers Wild Fury features a Monster of the Week known as Techno-Wizard, complete with appropriate powers. Just before the obligatory mech battle, he does a Fusion Dance with several of the villains' spaceships to gain an armoured form on par with the Megazords.
• In Stray (Dahne), Otacon's techno-wizardry is played up to the extent that he manages to build a homemade Time Machine.

Film — Live-Action

• Downplayed with Caleb from Ex Machina. Nathan mentions that as a programmer, he's "okay" or "pretty good" — though that's from the perspective of the most groundbreakingly advanced programmer in the world. He does manage to access Nathan's computer system and reprogram the doors.

• Best-known film example: Q from the James Bond films. All of his gadgets are disguised as ordinary objects, even non-electronic objects, with the exploding pen from GoldenEye being a prime example.
• Merlin in Kingsman: The Secret Service, though his case is more downplayed than his counterpart Q above, since he can't hack past biometrics locks.
• Hackerman from Kung Fury. His knowledge of Hollywood Hacking extends to the point that he can hack into time itself.

Literature

• Ax was the Animorphs resident techno whiz, due to Andalite knowledge being highly advanced compared to our own.

• Special mention ought to go to Ponder Stibbons from the Discworld series, a literal wizard, and one of the few who know how to work with the Unseen University's literal Magical Computer, Hex.
• The Executioner: 'Gadgets' Schwartz of the Heroes "R" Us group Able Team (also nicknamed "The Wizard" on occasion by the other members of his Power Trio).
• AEGIS from Exhuman is a girl locked in a dark room for dozens of years with nothing but a blank computer. Within days of it coming back online, she's written custom drivers to get an abandoned industrial factory up and running and is churning out blueprints for her own spy network and personal robot army. All while giving romantic advice to her superpowered roommate.
• Yuki Nagato from Haruhi Suzumiya. She hacked a computer game while playing and disabled the cheating of its creators they were playing against. She played it from the motherfucking code. And she learned all those computer skills in a matter of days, as she types faster and faster every day. Making it even better, she told Kyon in no uncertain terms that she wasn't using her data interface abilities; "I am staying within the limits of the programming."

• Considering the fact that Nanaki of the Tantei Team KZ Jiken Note series single-handedly turns the house he's cloistered in to run nearly completely in artificial intelligence (and an occasional driverless car), he falls into this.

Live-Action TV

• Arrowverse: Felicity Smoak from Arrow is said the be the best computer wizard/hacker. Cisco Ramone from the companion show The Flash (2014) once performs a bit of difficult computering and shouts out, "Who's the best hacker?" The entire rest of Team Flash responds, "Felicity Smoak!"

• Christopher Pelant from Bones takes this to ridiculous degrees. He can add/remove people from videos, infect computers by writing malware on bones, and basically do whatever he needs to escape punishment/torment the heroes with computers.

• Chuck:
  • Orion a.k.a Chuck's father Stephen Bartowski is revered as a Techno God by pretty much every organisation in the show.
  • Chuck himself is quite adept, being able to bypass FULCRUM encryption in minutes, amongst other things. He uses these skills to great effect as a Badass Normal, in season five.

• Adam in CSI: NY. He's the team's go-to guy for all things tech. In one case, some of the team wonder why an FBI alert for a particular criminal had never been put out. Mac replies that all the jurisdictions involved evidently hadn't gotten around to updating their databases so that the FBI wasn't aware of the guy...
  Mac: ...until we made the connection for them. Besides, we have Adam.
  [Enter Adam, with the perp's location on his tablet.]
  Adam: Got him!
• Doctor Who:
  • The Doctor, across most of their lives, generally has very impressive computer skills.
    • The Eleventh Doctor once wrote a computer virus on a cell phone in the span of only a few minutes, and won a hacking duel against a minion of the Great Intelligence.
    • The Thirteenth Doctor reconfigures a smartphone into a tracking device in less than five seconds without a sonic screwdriver while still in a state of post-regenerative confusion.
  • Mickey Smith once described himself as "technical support", and has the hacking skills to match, for instance hacking into UNIT to find out what's going on in "The Christmas Invasion".
  • Oswin Oswald, the first version of Clara Oswald seen, is so good at hacking Dalek technology she shocks the Doctor. It turns out that this is because she was converted into a Dalek herself, and is suppressing her memory of it out of trauma.
  • The original Clara Oswald, meanwhile, temporarily gains super-hacking skills after being partially uploaded to a data cloud in "The Bells of Saint John", as the uploaders spliced her a computer skills package. She puts them to good use tracking down the uploaders' location. It's implied that most of the computer skills faded after a while, as in "The Time of the Doctor", the Doctor complains about her not knowing how to use iPlayer (the BBC's online media player).
  • Nardole is quite good at hacking. Probably his most impressive moment is hacking fuel lines to blow up as a weapon against Cybermen in "The Doctor Falls".

• Alec Hardison from Leverage embodies this trope — he can hack anything (except a hick). Bonus points awarded for the fact that, like a real-life hacker, he uses social engineering almost as much as technical know-how to get what he wants... although he does have a tendency to take things a bit too far.

• Nikita: Birkhoff, Division's chief computer expert. Bonus points for designing his own computer network (Shadownet) and making it look enough like a computer game that any of Division's recruits can easily learn how to use it.
• Several Power Rangers characters qualify; usually if there's one person responsible for development and maintenance of the team's gear. This can be either The Smart Guy of the team or a separate Mission Control character. The list of these people includes but is not limited to Billy, Miss Fairweather, Trip, Cam, Hayley, Kat Manx, Dr. K, and Antonio.
• Primeval's dorky genius Connor Temple. Among other magic, dude built the anomaly detector (and handheld versions) and the anomaly locker and figured out how to program a piece of future tech without ever having seen the equipment before. Now if he could just reverse-engineer Abby...

• Cole in Tracker (2001) can do just about anything with human computers, including MacGyvering complex technologies from household items.

• Claudia in Warehouse 13, who (to Artie's horror) is skilled at hacking the Warehouse's own Steampunk/Diesel Punk Schizo Tech in addition to more conventional Playful Hacker skillz.

Video Games

• Pascal from Tales of Graces, she's so technologically savvy, she fills all the plot holes. She's also a mage.
• Aiden Pearce in Watch_Dogs. With one thumb and a smartphone, he makes all of Chicago his technological bitch. Marcus Holloway and the San Fransisco branch of DedSec go several steps beyond in Watch_Dogs 2.

Webcomics

• Eventually revealed to be literal in Homestuck when Sollux Captor is revealed to be a Mage of Doom. Beforehand, his coding was proficient enough to write a virus that made computers explode as well as curse the victim and anyone they knew. Apparently there are entire OS themed around what's essentially and/or coding that's sympathetic to real-world conditions. Might have something to do with the world being an RPG Mechanics 'Verse. Combined with the implementation of an esoteric Item Crafting system that runs on punch card coding to recreate or combine any object and you can have him make you literally anything.
• One of Remula's personalities in Jix named Lamerix is constantly creating weird devices that wreak havoc in the comic. Even before Lamerix surfaced, Remula reverse-engineered a device she had seen briefly.
• In Life (2012), Madison can solve almost any problem with her programs. Take, for example, her approach to a calculus test.
• In Sarilho, the augurs work as interpreters of the Word of God, and communicate with computers using some sort of psychic link, which apparently makes for a very personal and deep relationship with those machines and access to a lot of data.

Web Originals

• The children in The Innocent. They are effectively able to hack into every computer.
• Hafidha Gates of the Shadow Unit has a paranormal boost to her technical skills which she describes as "having perfect pitch for computers", with the practical result being that she can effortlessly hack into any computer connected to the Internet. Soon after the start of the series she also develops Technopathic powers, which lets her work her Techno Wizardry even faster.

Western Animation

• Tucker from Danny Phantom, who seems to be able to hack just about anything from his PDA, or failing that, with any of the other half-a-dozen tech gadgets he's constantly carrying around.

• Kim Possible: Wade built Kim's high-tech gadgets and can hack into just about any computer. On the villainous side, Frugal Lucre took over the TV networks and created a computer virus that could be uploaded from an ordinary checkout scanner.
• Corvax from Muzzy in Gondoland can make exact copies of people and turn himself invisible using his computer.
• In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Donatello definitely fits the trope — humorously, he's been referred to as a wizard on more than one occasion (for example, the Back to the Sewer episode "SuperQuest") and constantly called "Mr. Wizard" by his dimensional counterpart in Turtles Forever.

Real Life

• Given that the majority of computer users don't step far outside of video games, browsing the Internet, and email, pretty much anyone with an education in the subject beyond high school level can appear to be this. However, old-school hacker purists will always maintain that there is a clear and important difference between "hacking" (i.e. using an original, creative, and/or unconventional procedure to get a computer or system to do something useful) and "cracking" (achieving unauthorized access to a secure system, usually for nefarious ends but occasionally just to see what's there or prove that one can do it). Hackers in the original sense generally disdain and have no use for crackers, who are widely seen as inferior in terms of their knowledge and skill level (indeed they're more likely to trick the user into giving them access than force their way in) and who often use widely known exploits to do Bad Things. See Script Kiddie. Hollywood almost always ignores this distinction, to the extreme consternation of those that care about such minutiae.
• Fabrice Bellard. In 1997 he discovered a new, faster formula to calculate single digits of pi in binary representation. Won the International Obfuscated C Code Contest twice (including one entry being a self-hosted C compiler). In 2004, he wrote the TinyCC Boot Loader, which can compile and boot a Linux kernel from source in less than 15 seconds. In 2005, he designed a system that could act as an Analog or DVB-T Digital TV transmitter by directly generating a VHF signal from a standard PC and VGA card. In 2011, he created a minimal PC emulator written in pure JavaScript. Broke the world record for calculations of pi using a desktop computer instead of a supercomputer. Has written both the QEMU emulator and FFmpeg (a widely used multimedia encoding, decoding, and editing library).

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