Earlier today as Timoteo and Dimitri were leaving James’s dungeon.

I watched with some surprise as my two guests left my dungeon. I had been showing the elf what exponents and logarithms were, when the wolf-man got the elf’s attention and got them to head out, perhaps somewhat unexpectedly, at least based on the elf’s expression. I wonder what I had done that had spooked him, at least I am fairly certain I had spooked him, based on how he suddenly and what appeared involuntarily flattened his ears. Regardless, they left, and I was now back to entertaining myself as best I can by building and expanding my dungeon. Before I get back to that however, now that my guests are gone, I need to go about sterilizing my dungeon, and dealing with any metaphysical remnants I may create. My first problem was my entrance way, it had such a large volume of air flowing through it that anything could come in with it, so I started work on a creating a pair of doors set just before where I had let my influence permeate the air of the entryway, several feet further in than the bunk-room. So as to get things done more quickly if my guests decide to return, I accelerated my perception to maximum, and started work, creating a pair of vertically retracting doors made from graphene and diamond coated transparent aluminum totaling 10 centimeters thick and set 20 centimeters deep into the sides of the wall, shortly after night fell. Once I closed those doors, trapping a pair of birds trying to find a place to land high off the floor to no avail, I thought back to the other night when I killed the wolves. I killed them, whilst they were in my dungeon proper, like the birds are now. The trick now is to either kill them, and somehow prevent any metaphysical baggage, or to free them and prevent other miscellaneous entrants from taking advantage of the opening.

Despite my misgivings, I decided that for my future well being I was going to need to kill the birds to experiment with what happens when I do so. So as to try an additional method besides killing the birds whilst they were in my area of influence, I pulled back my influence to the walls and the floor of the room, leaving the air they were flapping around in free of my influence, and then taking aim, stabbed up with one of the floor spikes, killing it instantly, much to the other birds distress. I retracted the spike back into the floor, closing the tight fitting cover for the spike as it settled back into place, the bird fell to the floor, a small pool of blood starting to surround the body. I decided to wait five minutes real-time before I started to clean up the body, mostly to see if whatever metaphysical thing I absorbed from the body in addition to the biological information dissipated over time.

I spent those five real-time minutes, considering how I was going to deal with the various air vents I had coming into my dungeon, and even the bunk-room. I decided after some pondering that I was going to add a couple phases of filtration and at least a pair of sterilization phases, perhaps more, if I found they were insufficient to remove all inbound aerial microbes and contaminants. I started the cleanup of the dead bird slowly, starting with the blood and viscera on the retracted spike in the floor. A check of my inner space thereafter showed a distinct lack of metaphysical contamination, despite the addition of the knowledge regarding the birds DNA, which although I now knew, I could not fully interpret it as of yet, certainly not to the point where I could recreate a full bird from the blood cells and the few skin cells I had absorbed from cleaning the spike.

I decided to continue cleaning up the remains of the bird on the floor, however, I decided to be a bit cautious in how I absorbed the body and only absorbed a few grams from the body at a time before checking over my inner space. After half an hour real-time I had absorbed almost all of the remains except the head, with no noticeable metaphysical baggage so far. That changed a minute later when I absorbed part of the brain, as it seemed I got a wisp of angry flapping and pecking, which I promptly started to wipe away. Having dealt with that undesirable wisp of energy and instinct, I reflected on what I had learned from my experience. Firstly, the brain is the seat of the wisp of additional energy and instinct, secondly despite having waited just over half an hour realtime, the wisp was still just over half as strong as the wisp I had experienced from the wolves. Based on this, I figured a new tactic for dealing with the problem of the birds brain lying on my floor was required.

Before I dealt with that, I opened the doors just enough for the other bird to escape, and promptly closed them again once it did. A fairly quick synthesis of 200 grams of magnesium powder, and a 10 watt blue laser for an ignition source, and voila, 3100 centigrade of bright white flame creates one very carbonized former bird brain on the floor. I was going to have to save that blue laser diode configuration for future reference. After the flame had burnt itself out, I waited another real-time minute before I tried absorbing the now carbonized remains on my dungeon floor. Much to my annoyance, the wisp, although significantly more disorganized and harder to identify, was still enough to trigger that revulsion I first felt when absorbing the wolves remains, a quick few swipes through my inner space, and I no longer felt like I had stepped in hot crude oil. I guess I was going to have to wait at least several real time hours after cremating a corpse before absorbing it to let the energy dissipate, this in addition to limiting my influence to the solid materials of my dungeon, seemed like it was the best way to deal with this issue, at least for now. I truly was not a fan of letting a body start to develop rigor mortis before dealing with the mess, but, it seems that I would have to.

I turned my focus away from my entryway back over to the ventilation system, and what I was going to need to do for filtration and sterilization. First I sealed the entrances to each of my four, one meter diameter ventilation shafts, then placed a rough graphene screen over the entrance to the shafts, which frankly I should have done when I first put them in place, the one centimeter square grid in the screen allowed for plenty of airflow when unobstructed. It then took me until 12:35 AM to reroute all four shafts through a central location, above the entryway. I then lined the last 2 meters of those shafts, before they entered the new centralized filtration and sterilization area, with 100 Watt Ultraviolet laser diodes in a pattern that assisted with heat dissipation and provided maximum coverage of each of the shafts, at this point I unsealed the shafts as I would need to test the system with air moving through it.

I did end up having to water cool the shafts, and working that out took me until 4:15 AM, I really, really didn’t want living things getting past that, but considering the wind speed through the shaft, it was possible. I gathered each of the shafts into a five meter central shaft which I had lined with silver plates and a much higher voltage and amperage version of my door traps, which essentially was just an air gapped electrostatic discharge device, much like a tabletop Van de Graaff generator. This one was a real power hog, it alone used almost 10 kilowatts of direct current electricity, which made for one heck of a bug zapper, fortunately the electrostatic discharges had the additional effect of creating ozone in the air moving through it assisting in the sterilization of bacteria.

I finally forced the air, with blower style fans into significantly smaller tubes which led down almost to the bottom of 4 meter deep circulating pool of water, which I pumped in from my hydro-electric generator, and then back out. I added almost five meters of 5 watt UV lasers to the outflow pipe to breakdown the ozone that would make its way into the pool, I didn’t want to kill off the ecosystem downstream. It was 9:50 AM before I managed to get that working the way I wanted it, it took quite a bit of energy to pump that much air through that much water, then direct that outflow back to where I had it going before, one shaft over to the bunk-room providing fresh air, one over to the current back of my dungeon, providing a positive pressure in the dungeon, which would help limit inflow of new bacteria through the main entry, one down to my material science lab area, and the final shaft down to help deal with cooling what will be my first main computer room, which I still hadn’t started actually filling yet, sigh.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Unfortunately, it didn’t seem as though I was going to be able to get to it today at least, as my entryway needed a major re-work, if not complete replacement to better prevent unwanted visitors. I decided that I needed to implement an air lock style entryway, this at least would help limit my larger visitors to sapient ones, and the same style graphene screens for the air outflow from the dungeon, although the ones for the entryway I made a mere centimeter tall, and used half millimeter screen openings. Those I placed at the top of the entryway walls, the new airlock I placed immediately behind the vertical doors I had created the night before. The airlock doors I made the same dimensions as the one to enter the bunk-room, although here, like the vertical doors, I also constructed using transparent aluminum coated with graphene over diamond, the airlock itself was placed across the entire entryway with the entry and exit doors offset on opposite sides of the entryway. I had leveraged electromagnetic locks and a motion sensor, like then one I had used for the bunk-room door to ensure that only one door could be opened at a time, and that only when one door had people near it.

I finally finished fiddling with all the airlock shenanigans by 9 PM that night. As such, I finally reopened my blast style vertical doors, recessing them back into the floor and ceiling, leaving the airlock door system and my positive pressure air ventilation system as my primary layers of defense against unwanted visitors to my dungeon. Although I did want to get back to designing my CPU, I thought back to my visitors time in my dungeon, and the look on their faces when they reached the end of the dungeon, the disappointment on their faces wasn’t something I really wanted to see on visitor faces in future. I decided that I needed to expand my dungeon floor, and try to at least keep with the theme of light puzzles for the moment, although, now that Ihad successfully tested a speaker in the presence of my visitors, I think I should add a sound component to the new puzzles, that might be interesting.

I started off my dungeon expansion by adding a room just after the room that had my calculator as a prize, speaking of which, let me just replace that before I go any further. I added the same style electrostatic trap that I had used for my first two doors in the dungeon proper, and this time for the puzzle I set up a retractable piano style keyboard below the panel on the side of where I placed the light based component of the puzzle. When visitors completed the light component, I would have it trigger the sound of a set of notes, that they would then have to match from the piano keyboard. Getting the circuitry to detect everything correctly was interesting but wasn’t as complex as getting the branching logic circuits working correctly on the CPU design, that was being a pain, and I was currently being passive aggressive in avoiding that problem, by working on building out a few more rooms to the dungeon proper. After building two of the light and sound combination puzzle rooms, I decided to have a second cabinet with a prize, this time instead of a calculator, I provided a handheld audio recorder with a pair of builtin speakers. I set it up so that it could store a full days audio in a single save slot, of which I provided ten, selectable via a labeled knob, in addition to the earth standard set of audio controls, I also provided a small display which showed the duration of the audio recording, and the current time index.

I powered the device with a lead lined beta-voltaic diamond battery. The battery I thought was pretty cool, it would produce 2 volts at 5 milli-amps of power for at least five thousand years. I was planning on leveraging more of those batteries to provide long term backup power for several computer components, that I had yet to build, but did have a few in the design phase in my text editors memory. By the time I had finished all this I had spent a full three days real-time in my accelerated perception, and I started to notice a slight distortion in my autonomic feedback display, it took me a minute or so to realize that I was vibrating and thus generating heat, which at this point was starting to distort the silver wire contacts for the display leads. I stepped down out of my accelerated perception and surveyed the damage. Fortunately, there didn’t seem to be much, although I would have to clean up about half of the leads coming out of the base of my stand. I took a quick survey of my core crystal, and it appeared as though I had lucked out, the bouts of self surgery that I had used to purge the impurities from my crystal had left my crystal pristine, and not nearly as vulnerable to resonant frequency shattering as a different crystal would have been.

Although, it seemed as though the vibrations grow in amplitude over time, and as such, eventually, if I didn’t put in measures to prevent it, I too could shatter from this problem. So first things first, now that I had identified the problem, add a thermal sensor, and have it trigger an automatic step down to real time if the sensor trips, also, I put in a set of optical sensors that would measure the amplitude of the vibration, and display that on a small separate display, later I would probably replace the thermal step down trigger with one based off of that amplitude. A crystals resonant frequency differs based on size, geometry and composition, as my crystal is growing over time, I would need to dynamically adjust the step down trigger accordingly. Sigh, more math, important math, but more, some days I do get a bit tired of having to do as much math in setting up my dungeon, it isn’t like I could call down to an engineering firm with some rough specifications and have them build it for me, oh well.

As I was forced to take a break from my accelerated perception work, I decided to take a look at the sky. It was night five days after my visitors had left my dungeon, the moons were high in the sky, and thus far no unexpected non-sapient visitors had managed to bypass my filters or airlock. Thinking back to my visitors, I wondered where they were, and how far from civilization I might be, I didn’t see any signs of towns or villages when looking out westward from my entrance, but for all I knew such signs could be just a few kilometers over the horizon. That was going to need investigation, I could build a remote controlled quad-copter with a video camera, but I would be limited by signal strength and reflection distances from the ionosphere. Frankly, I think I will wait on that investigation until after I manage to put a satellite array in orbit, much easier to get reconnaissance that way. Although, I had a long way to go before I managed satellite launch capability.

To start off my capabilities in that direction, I would definitely need to complete my computer system, but I could start by setting up a radio interferometric receiver array near and around the summit of the mountain I was on, I wouldn’t really be able to use it for much of anything until after I got some programs running on my computer system to process the signals and correctly combine them. It would be nice to do some nice radio based astrophysics, but I think I will end up primarily using the system to communicate with the satellite array I intend to put in place later. I really do want to be able to see what this planet looks like from space, I wonder how different its land masses are from Earth’s. As I was pondering far future plans, and avoiding the bloody branching logic circuits, Professor Kozyrakis would be so disappointed with me at this point, I saw a four foot tall lizard like person with a spear and what appeared to be a bandolier of some kind step into the clearing, the light of the moons reflecting off the scales of its head. Well, this is going to be a different experience than my previous set of visitors.