Now, James looking in on the bunk-room containing Timoteo and Dimitri, from the camera above the display at the front of the room.

I could have easily watched my visitors puzzle over all the things in the bunk-room I had placed there for their use for the next several hours. However, being unable to communicate, even via just pictures was more than a little annoying, so that meant I had other priorities, and that I should probably get things done as fast as possible. First, I disabled the audio input, as it was about to be distorted into unintelligibility, then, I ratcheted up to my maximum temporal distortion. By sundown, I would have experienced almost the equivalent of three days to allow me to tinker and make adjustments. Time to get right back to it. I faced the problem I did last night, control of the energy being read by the wires in my pedestal, additionally it seemed as though, I constantly put out energy that could be read by those same wires. This probably meant that my little autonomic feedback display, was probably the closest I had to the equivalent of an FMRI back on Earth, not that that currently helped me at this moment.

I needed to truly identify my goals, and then break down the problem, hopefully into achievable chunks. First, I wanted to achieve audio communication with my visitors. Second, I wanted to achieve bidirectional video communication with my visitors, at minimum a representation of my core to go with the audio I wanted to transmit to them. I didn’t want to use the autonomic feedback output I had already achieved, as that might lead to someone, possibly being able to interpret my thoughts directly, that seemed dangerous, and not something I really wanted to do. Text based communications would work, however, that seemed like a less than satisfying stop-gap. Ideally, I wanted to represent myself as a human in a conference room, if only a virtual one, over a video link, that goal, would take no mere 8 bit or even 16 bit processor, additionally it would require a significant amount of programming. Now admittedly, I could code, but realistically I was going to have to design everything, and that level of graphical hardware and programming was some ways away from where I was at this moment in time. Third, and probably lastly, I wanted enough computing power and storage to run my dungeon in a digital fashion, with enough storage to hold more than 10,000 years worth of raw video and audio, and enough additional capacity to act as the backbone to a new global internet, that it didn’t exist yet was immaterial, that my visitors would want or even conceive of such a thing, also immaterial, at least to my early stage plans, later, we’ll see.

Starting with communicating to my visitors via audio, I decided to try the simple, although silly option of hooking a speaker up directly to an input wire from my pedestal, as, well, lack of mouth or vocal chords limited my options somewhat. To my mild surprise, the bulk of the raw audio I put out from one wire was infrasonic, and well below human and I suspect, wolf man or elvish hearing capabilities, even adjusted for my currently accelerated temporal perception. Not to mention I was only putting out a couple of decibels worth of volume. I had to put together a decibel meter to check that, frankly it was slightly embarrassing that it took almost 10 seconds of real time for me to guess that there wasn’t a problem with the speaker, sigh. An amplifier made the output the rough equivalent of a small subwoofer, I would need to frequency shift the raw output of the wire to get it into the human frequency range. Roughly an hour of my time later, and I had something which would dump my raw output to a speaker in the human audio frequency range. I still had the problem of content though. Not having vocal chords after a life of having them absolutely sucks, an exercise in complete frustration. I decided to scrap this part of the project as frankly I wasn’t going to be able to speak down a wire, it seemed any time soon.

I needed to tackle this problem from a different angle. I decided, after about an hour of my times worth of my favorite navel gazing activity, watching my ball of plasma in my inner space, which currently had the backdrop of the video from my visitors investigation of their bunk-room, that I should see about putting together a physical keyboard, and then a simple chip to control the output of the keyboard to one of my LED displays. I really had wanted to skip the whole physical keyboard thing, but I guess I had to start somewhere.

After almost four hours of real-time, forget about my accelerated perception of it, I had a working keyboard to display controller chip, serving a similar function to the venerable Intel 8279 back in the original 8086 design. I had spent way too long deciding on a font and the appropriate font size, almost a full hour real-time. I ended up deciding my font size based on my currently standard LED display size, 20 inches wide by 10 inches tall, 10,000 pixels by 5,000 pixels, this gave me a pixel density of 500 pixels per inch, the font size I chose to use, at least for my future console access was the equivalent of size 7.2pt font. This was a fairly small tenth of an inch, but did have the benefit of having a nice even 50 pixels of height, to keep things somewhat simple, I set the width of the font to be 25 pixels wide. All told this gave me an equivalent text console on my standard displays of 400 characters across by 100 rows of text. I had further complicated things by storing the font representation for each character in a set of addressable memory that I had the display controller reference for each key, I had also set up a frame buffer for the screen, allowing me to place each character in a specific location in the buffer, and thus on the screen, with each dump of the buffer to the display.

It was significantly more frustrating exercise than I would have liked it to be. Professor Kozyrakis of my EE180 course would not have given me anything more than a C for this effort, regardless of how little time I took to make it. I was definitely going to have to redesign this thing later when I had some additional tools made. Still, it was a success in that I was able to type, and it was able to display what I typed, I did make a few extra control keys on the keyboard to help simplify things for me, at least until I had this thing hooked up further, but I could now pose questions to my visitors via my displays. At least, once I hooked the displays up to this thing, at least temporarily, sigh, the things you forget when you are all excited. Another thing I had been avoiding, but would not be able to for much longer was, I was going to have to design and implement my own custom assembly code for my yet to be designed CPU, I had barely gotten a B in EE180 due to my lack of aptitude for assembly. Although most of my chip designs had been lauded by the professor back then, the ones I had built so far, in my new dungeon existence, for the most part, probably would have only gotten me a B for their designs, instead of my usual A’s.

I had, for the most part been half-assing my efforts so that I could put out some technology reasonably quickly. Actually, now that I had time to think about it, some of my rushed efforts, seemed strangely unlike my normal, somewhat more even keeled approach to design and problem solving. Perhaps it was some of those rumored dungeon instincts, the various novels I had read containing similar protagonists, had mentioned, perhaps not. Regardless, for the moment it seemed as though my uncertainty regarding the natives, and also my new state of existence, had been somewhat eased, at least for now. Despite that anxiety not poking at me this very moment, it didn’t mean I was going to stop my efforts to put together a computer to go with my crappy text console chip, it just meant I could take the time to actually design things properly, without feeling like I was under a deadline I knew nothing about.

I made a quick adjustment to my keyboard display drivers system, and added a couple dozen gigabytes worth of volatile RAM and a basic text editing system, to it, essentially a simple raw editor that would save a text file to a memory location, or read a previously saved file. There was no formatting at this point, just raw information stored in memory, no file system of any kind, just a table of locations on a stack. With this modification I could make notes both to myself and my visitors, if I so chose, however, specifically I intended these notes to be leveraged in the design of better hardware for my self. The first new set of hardware I was going to build myself was a mouse, so that I could then leverage a pointing device for use in the next necessary program I would kludge together, an EE level circuit diagraming application. Trying to do everything by mark 1.0 core vision was what had gotten me into all these half-assed chips and other minor issues and inefficiencies I would be sorting out over the next few days or weeks, real-time. The idea for the circuit diagraming application wasn’t going to be like one of the ones I had used back at Stanford which did a lot of nice things for you, like voltage and amperage checking, and also a library of prebuilt components. No, unfortunately the one I was going to make was going to be a simple drawing application with a set of a few prebuilt circuit symbols that I would hard code into the application.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Shortly after night-fell, and my visitors had managed to figure out the kitchen and the bathroom, I had managed to put together my simplistic one button mouse, and my little diagramming application, along with the updated raw pixel to frame-buffer hardware needed for it. At this point, I stepped down out of my accelerated time perception, to listen to my visitors and also to start diagraming out more efficient versions of several chips, and other components, I would need in future, along with those I had already put into place. As the night went on, I added several new bundles of optical cable coming into my core, elevator car, one of which I used for the output of my keyboard and mouse, another I hooked into a double pixel density display that I placed just above the keyboard and mouse, along with a camera, microphone and speakers to go with the display.

The reason for not hooking the display directly up to my core is the disconnect between needing to view the display within my inner space, and also needing to manipulate the annoying physical keyboard and mouse setup in the real-world. When I eventually figure out a way around the problem, or succeed in creating a means to interpret my ambient electromagnetic signals as a viable control method, I am going to have myself a little bonfire for those human interface devices, which I have thus far had to rely on. Once I had the optical cables set up, I moved the interface device and frame buffer system I had built, out of my core elevator car, and into a larger space that I had set aside, some 10 feet away from the elevator shaft, in the granite layer I had located below my original position. A quick power run, an extension of the optical cable, and a little re-wiring and I was now hooked up remotely to the room I would use to design and build out the computer hardware I wanted to implement.

After I had gotten that setup, I went back and added a pair of cameras with microphones in the center of the ceiling of the entryway of the dungeon proper, just behind where I had the doors for my defensive roller system, so as to not disturb the seeming uniform nature of the ceiling’s LED lighting, I leverage fiber optic cables direct to the camera photo-sensors angled such that the camera had a decent view, one towards the entrance of the dungeon, the other facing inwards, towards where I had placed my light puzzle rooms.

Whilst I was checking out my newly installed stealth ceiling cameras, I noted a different type of nocturnal visitor than last night, a pair of wolves, wandered into the entrance of my dungeon, despite the bright lighting, and tried to curl up in a corner. I say tried, because they didn’t last long, I unleashed one of my other defensive systems I had placed in addition to the rollers, a set of hidden, graphene and diamond tipped spikes. As soon as the spikes retracted into the floor, their covers flowing back into place seamlessly, I started absorbing the bodies, mostly to clean the place up. Turns out that dungeons in this world do get a boost of energy from killing things, it wasn’t a huge boost, but easily a day or two of active absorption back prior to my bouts of self-surgery. In addition, I suddenly knew far more about timber wolves and their instincts than I had ever wanted to know, almost to the point that I could possibly make my own. For some reason, that last thought creeped me out, although, I didn’t really feel it would be wrong for me to do so, to my formerly human sensibilities, however, it just seemed, off.

I hadn’t to this point in time really decided that I was going to be as purely a technological dungeon as possible, I had mostly been going with what I knew, which was 20th and 21st century Earth technology. This new experience, killing the pair of wolves, and absorbing their bodies, down to the last atom, learning how the wolves were put together from the atomic level up, and most of all, how they behaved when threatened, disturbed me to my core, no pun intended. I decided, here, now, and for the future, although, I might kill to protect my dungeon from unwanted intruders, I would not go about creating minions to populate my dungeon, I didn’t need them for protection, and I had no desire to start down the path of being antagonistic toward visitors of my dungeon. It might be a viable growth methodology for other dungeons, but frankly, I didn’t need it. My self-surgery had boosted my ambient energy absorption capabilities easily fifty times more than they had been initially, as such, I had no need to consume life to maintain my inner flame, certainly at this point of my existence.

After this decision, I went back into my inner space to look and see if absorbing the wolves, had done anything to me, I wasn’t really expecting to find anything, although the energy I had received from absorbing their corpses was about 50% more than it should have been, based simply on their mass. After about half an hour examining both my inner ball of plasma and the wisps of energy that had yet to have been absorbed, I noticed a somewhat faint shadow in one of the wisps that had yet to be incorporated into the center my inner ball of plasma represented. The shadow appeared to be a wolf’s head, snarling, as I had decided to not make use of the death that had occurred in my dungeon, I tried to destroy that wisp by swiping a mental hand through it. I was only partially successful on a single swipe to disrupt the wisp, however, after a good dozen or so follow-up swipes, the wisp had fully dissipated. I checked myself over, looking at the knowledge I had received after having absorbed the wolf, and although I still knew how to put a wolf together biologically, I no longer had a sense of its instincts, nor did I feel the slight revulsion I had previously, overall, based on my decision earlier, I thought this a good thing.

This world, and my new form, were still too new to me, I had too much to learn, frankly, it was a not so minor miracle that I have come as far as I have in the short month and some odd weeks I had been here. Trying to figure out how to destroy these wisps of instinct, of the perhaps spiritual remnants, automatically would have to be left to another day. I still had my dungeon to build, and I had spent an hour too long on metaphysical pursuits. I reactivated my maximum temporal perception boost, also hitting the key on the keyboard to boost the refresh rate of the display to match. I then spent the next 8 hours, real-time, drawing out and planning circuit designs, leveraging my calculator for the electrical current requirements. As I went along, I swapped back and forth from circuit designer, to text editor, documenting everything as I went along, I designed an extremely over engineered 256bit wide memory management unit chip, I didn’t think I would ever have, or use that much memory, but, I figured it would add a fair amount of longevity to the design. I leveraged the vacuum channel transistor design I had been using successfully, and calculated several additional variables I had been half-assing before, heat output, maximum and minimum operating temperature, voltage, amperage and also susceptibility to interference, both for the individual subcomponents and the full chip itself, at several different build sizes, focusing primarily on my desired 5nm production scale.

I was glad that I had my boosted temporal perception allowing me to get this all done quickly, with all my testing I had filled almost fifty or so pages of notes per major chip design, and a least ten per subcomponent. I had paid extra special attention to all the major components I had previously ignored such considerations, whilst doing so, I found several problems I would have to resolve, mostly around heat dissipation, the cameras despite their success, had a few frequency bands that were not as sensitive as they should be. A close examination of the LED displays I had around my dungeon, showed problems with viewing angle. These and more I put on my todo list to rectify as soon as possible.

In and amongst all the documentation, I built out a large circuit testing lab, near, although not immediately next to the room where I currently had the keyboard controller and frame buffer.

I started to re-route some of the longer power cables from my hydro-generators to be more organized, taking slightly longer paths, however, no longer drawn haphazardly about the inside of the mountain, at least, when I finished the re-routing. The lab and what I will label the primary computing room, I added faraday cage type shielding, diamond and graphene walls for structural integrity, and I lined the walls with silver tubing to carry water for cooling the rooms.

I still hadn’t started constructing any new computing hardware by the time dawn rolled around, but I was in a much better position from a design and planning perspective. As dawn brightened the horizon, I stepped down my temporal perception, until I was once again experiencing the world in real-time. My visitors had kept a watch going through the night, but now the elf, who had the benefit of sleep since midnight, awoke, and soon started preparing a small breakfast. Apparently, he was feeling less uncomfortable with the kitchen, after the travails of last nights supper. I took a quick look around my entryway, to see if I had any other visitors since the wolves I had killed. Unfortunately for my desires of a pristine technological dungeon, it turns out I did, a fairly large number of small insects and a few arachnids, none of which were having any, real luck with the extreme smoothness of the walls and its hydrophobic nano-texture. If I didn’t want to have an infestation, I was going to have to do the dirty work of either killing them all or driving them off, that and prevent them from coming into my dungeon in future. That set of problems was going to be a major future annoyance.