> Chapter -2147483644 (Classing Up I)
Ada awoke in what appeared to her to be a rather modern version of a datacenter, with a few notable oddities. The first weirdness she noticed was that Ada was not being deafened by thousands of cooling fans desperately attempting to maintain homeostasis for their connected hardware. There was an unmistakable background hum, but beyond that, the noise level was no more than a quiet office building would have. The second weird thing Ada noticed was that she was neither freezing nor overheated -- the ambient temperature was actually quite tolerable. Beyond those two items of note, the environment felt both comfortable and familiar.
Looking around, recognition of the space slowly trickled into Ada’s mind. She knew where she needed to go to find her guide. There would be an alcove three rows down at the end where there would be workstations, and that would be where her guide would be waiting.
Walking through the facility, Ada looked behind the cages on either side of the path and found she was able to identify each piece of equipment as they happily hummed away on their racks. There was both fiber optic and copper based networking equipment, blade servers, and other name branded server hardware, on all of which the brand badges had been conveniently filed off, preventing anyone needing to worry about silly things like trademark violations. Ada recalled the first time she had gotten to go to a datacenter on a school field trip and watched the IT workers hooking up a new piece of hardware on a server rack. That had been a formative moment for her, cementing her love of all things inorganic and electronic.
Turning a corner, Ada saw the U-shaped alcove at the end of the row precisely where she had expected it to be. There were two desks, complete with dual monitors, mouse, keyboard, and what appeared to be a desktop computer directly from the mid 1990s in a disgusting beige box. Along the wall between the two stations was a narrow shelf which held a rather nice looking espresso machine and all of the accessories Ada had wished she could have had at her apartment back home, she would even have sworn she could smell her favorite blend from the local roastery near her home back in Michigan. Sure enough, there was that familiar brown paper bag.
One of the two desks was already occupied by a figure that Ada did not recognize. From behind, the person had long, wavy, dark brown hair gathered in a high ponytail, but was otherwise dressed in a rather standard black T-shirt and khaki shorts, much like what Ada had worn to her casual dress office on the daily.
Without turning around, a feminine voice called out, “You’re late again. Grab a coffee and have a seat. We have a lot of material to go through.”
Ada blinked. The voice was unfamiliar, and yet she was certain that it had been her own voice. Deciding to just roll with it, Ada shrugged and proceeded to measure out a dose and grind the beans. She loaded the portafilter, stirred the grounds with a wire tool, then tamped and locked the portafilter onto the machine. Once the machine was done pushing water through the grounds, she removed the portafilter and knocked the puck out into a little box designed just for that purpose. Lastly, she added milk to the final product creating her favorite drink, the flat white.
Ada breathed deeply, savoring the aroma. She took a sip, and it was absolute perfection.
The figure rotated in the chair, looked Ada in the eye, and then spoke, “Alright, if you’re done being a pretentious idiot, will you sit down? We have so much to go through. Someone sent us a manual so thick that technical certification companies would be jealous. And then I have dozens of class options, several of which were handed off by actual gods, let alone the ones brought in by angels. I bet you don’t even know what we did to earn this kind of attention.”
“I.. what?” Ada was confused. Before her was a beautiful woman with dark hair and brilliant blue eyes wearing one of Ada’s favorite T-shirts which read “Solvem Probler” across the front in faded gold lettering. Then, she finally realized -- this woman was her. She hadn’t had access to a mirror since she showed up in this world, and had never seen her own face since the change.
This made sense. She had been told that she’d have a guide in the form of her inner soul, and she’d known her body was wrong ever since she had been a teenager. It had taken entirely too long to figure out what exactly that meant, and she had even made an appointment to go see a doctor about starting to work on fixing that. In fact, she had been on her way to that appointment when...
Ada couldn’t remember. She knew there should have been a memory, but instead, she had a big blank. She remembered getting dressed, having coffee, getting in her car, and leaving to go to her appointment at the gender clinic at the University hospital, but that’s where everything ended.
“Yeah, you noticed too,” said the other woman. “That was as much as I’ve been able to recover so far. The rest of the day is just gone, and it took me this long to get just that morning back, but we do know one thing for certain. We died, Ada. We died, and then we got brought here.”
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“I remember the last day now. We had just claimed a massive bug bounty and finished writing up the report, and I came out to everyone. They took me out for drinks to celebrate, and I got home late. That morning, I overslept and had a massive hangover, and I was rushing to get to my appointment on time. There must have been an accident on the highway or something.” After a brief pause, Ada opened her eyes wide and exclaimed, “Oh fuck me, I’m an isekai cliche, aren’t I?”
The other Ada... no, she couldn’t keep thinking about this woman like that. Ada would have to come up with a title or something, because weren’t they both Ada? Anyway, the other Ada tapped her chin, thinking.
“Hmm, we don’t actually know for certain if it was Truck-kun that got us, but I’ll admit it’s a pretty decent chance. I’ll keep some resources working on it, but for now, we have more pressing concerns.”
Ada finally sat and sucked down the remainder of her coffee. “OK, lay it on me, what’s the big deal?”
“Here,” the other woman said, handing over a massive manual.
Ada read the cover. “You’ve died and traveled to another world. The System and You: a practical guide to the cosmos, 8th edition.”
The other.. wait, no, she needed to be called something.. Caretaker? Custodian? Facility Supervisor? ... these were all bad options. Finally, Ada decided to just ask, “Hey, I can’t just keep thinking about you as ‘other Ada’, what should we call each other?”
“Yeah, I was thinking about that too. You should keep being Ada. You haven’t gotten to use that name for very long so far, and I think you deserve it. I’ve always been like this in here, though the environment has gone through a bit of an overhaul recently. Why don’t we just complete the reference, and you call me Lovelace?” said Lovelace.
“That’ll work. Have you had time to review this thing?” said Ada, holding up the massive tome she had been handed. “This thing is huge, I don’t know how time works in here versus out there, and we are in a bit of a time crunch. I need to be back out there by morning.”
“Alright, Cliff’s notes version. There’s a system, you know that already. The system regulates magic, rewarding people that do impressive things, experience impressive events, see impressive things, et cetera. It clearly hooks into me somehow, because I gained an intrinsic knowledge about how a lot of the mechanics operate, which you’ll get some of that after you pick a class and learn some skills. I also have complete knowledge of all of the classes that are on offer this time around. All of that just appeared within me when you entered this space.” Lovelace looked up and continued, “Don’t worry, I already spun up some processes to sniff the IO stream to work out how to reverse engineer the protocols. I’m sure with enough time, we’ll be able to spoof whatever we want. That’s a concern for later, however.”
Ada nodded, “Right, concerns for right now. Tell me about the classes we have available.”
Lovelace turned around, grabbing a box off her desk. This was a sort of clamshell box with a beige bottom half and a translucent gray-brown top, with a collection of what Ada thought looked exactly like 3.5” floppy diskettes inside. All of the diskettes in the box were blue. Lovelace handed the box to Ada.
“These are the classes that various different gods popped over to offer us. They’re all blue quality, and they each put us in service to whichever god offered it. It’ll allow the god to communicate directly with us rather easily, and give them a bit more access to me than they’d otherwise have. It’s not a lot of access, but they’d be siphoning off a bit of mana constantly. I’m reasonably confident that I’d be able to revoke that access eventually and cut off the mana supply, but that may not be worth the hassle. Anyway, changing classes later on and picking a non-divine class will have the same effect of cutting off the god,” said Lovelace.
Ada nodded back at this and said, “Divine classes, like [Cleric], [Paladin], [Priestess], [Oracle], that kind of thing?”
Lovelace nodded, “yeah, but more like [Initiate] and [Acolyte], this is only level 8, you know. Hmm.. actually I think we did get one [Oracle] offered, from this weirdo who kept changing appearances. I think there was some kind of three legged crow at one point? Whatever, not important. I don’t recommend any of these. They’re way more powerful than any of the other classes we have to choose from, but I don’t like the idea of getting tied to some other entity without more knowledge of who they are and what they stand for.”
Ada replied, “Agreed. Wholeheartedly. We’ve never been a joiner before, and with incomplete information, this isn’t any time to start.”
“Right, so moving on to the non-divine offerings,” Lovelace said, turning around to grab another box of floppy diskettes. She handed the new box over to Ada and took back the first box, putting that on the shelf next to the espresso machine.
Ada looked over this new box. Most of the contents were either pink or red disks, but there were a few that were orange or yellow, and one was a dark plum purple. Looking the assortment over, Ada sighed. There were a lot.
“Alright, I guess we start going through these, starting with the highest quality and working down until we find the ones that are good fits,” she said.
Ada turned around and set the box of disks down on the desk, opened it, and reached for the magenta disk. She slotted it into the 3.5” floppy drive on the beige box in front of her, and pushed the power button. The system started humming as it came to life.