Originally Posted by Ryllharu
Apologies for the incoming wall of text. I may also have an inconsistency here or there. No level of proofreading could catch them all, feel free to correct any you find.
While the monitors were EEGs instead of EKGs, there was an awful large quantity of blood on the one station of the girl Kiyama was the closest to. The techs also mentioned blood transfusions. Now that you bring it up, perhaps the effect induced on the orphans was very similar to the one when an Esper uses magic.
I think you might be right about the the formula of magic. Skimming the first three episodes of Index, Stiyl needed runes all over the place to summon his flame monster. Similarly, Loli-sensei was nearly swallowed a few times when she was invoking the ritual to save Index. In the latter case, every time she started to lose focus, the world distorted in a way that Index's programs called "dangerous" for Loli-sensei. So perhaps a magician invokes a random, out of control AIM field and then warps it to their will in a form that is familiar to them. An Esper on the other hand starts from the reverse. They start with a controlled form of reality manipulation, and slight imperfections in their control generate AIM fields. If those coalesce, we get AIM field singularities.
In Kiyama's case, she was unfamiliar with the unique distortions of all the abilities she absorbed. This caused a great deal of stress on her mind (which was bolstered by the fact that she was the node for the Level Upper). This appeared physically when all the capillaries in her one eye burst. Later when Mikoto did enough damage to her, she lost control over the disparate abilities, and the number of imperfections created expanded rapidly, already centrally located. They then immediately formed a AIM field singularity entity.
During the experiment, perhaps they forced through science an out of control AIM field on the children in the same way that a magician invokes their out of control field through belief, reproducing the same effect of an Esper trying to use magic. However, a magician has a number of safeguards in place, which may even include their "magic name."
Suppose that a magician creates the field, and if it fails to be controlled properly, they are killed in the backlash. Strict training allows them to avoid this, but in an event like Touma destroying runes, the field was controlled already and merely dissipates when the laws binding the field are destroyed.
This would fit with Index's own ability of Spell Intercept. She can't interfere with a self-contained, bound AIM field, like a summoned magical construct in automaton mode, but she is able to inject her own variations of the remotely bound AIM field, like signal noise in a broadcast. This may be due to the runic binding not being completely self-contained, as the magician is altering the invoked AIM field from a distance, so the ritual would not be considered "completed."
An Esper wouldn't be able to bind this kind of field properly because even if they have the proper training, the AIM flows toward the nearest source, an Esper's body. They generate AIMs on their own, so an invoked one might be bound, but it may still go toward the path of least resistance instead of dissipating completely. Magicians in essence pull an AIM out of the ether, so it goes back to it when it is done, their physical bodies are not receptive to the reality altering quantum physics that Espers are.
In a way, an Esper may be like a permanently invoked and bound incantation. The AIM fields they generate are gaps in the binding. As such, when they attempt to use magic, it creates a level of interference and produces a backlash similar to the one when a magician fails to bind an AIM field. In most cases, they don't get swallowed into it because their own distortion of reality manages to eventually wrest control, at the cost of the extra energy ravaging their body. If the spell was large enough, it destroys their body when they fail to control it. An Esper's ability is largely unconscious calculations being done a million times a second, so characters like Acclerator can do truly amazing things. Perhaps someone like him could wrest control over magically invoked fields with less damage to his own body.
If this theory is correct, then it would also fit in with Touma's ability. He can cancel both magic and esper abilities because he simply negates AIM fields entirely. Espers generate them as a byproduct of their internal, self-contained reality modification, and magicians attempt to gather them and warp them to their will.
