Today, I encountered a mailbox outside of our house as mom was the one who fetched the mail. As she carried a letter to the house, I giddily identified the information comprising its contents - as it was my first step to learning the written language of my new home. The only problem was that I was simply starting to lose track of things.
The biggest issue was that the Infoscope gave me far too much information to process. I refused to simplify my spell - back when I was just a university student learning about computers under Professor Sergey Lebedev I worked with advanced machines like the BESM series. Over the years Dr. Lebedev showed our team how technology evolved and computers became smaller and more powerful with each iteration.
When it came to data gathering and sorting - I believed that the more complex and innovative a tool was, the better results it produced.
Computers in my world grew by leaps and bounds because having computers allowed humanity to make better computers. Moore's law, a probability observation made by the co-founder of Intel Gordon E. Moore in 1965, was an incredible, self-fulfilling prophecy about the indisputable fact that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubled approximately every two years.
In the same manner a more complex Identify allowed me to design the Infoscope and having the Infoscope would allow me to make something else even better. Productivity begat productivity and with design of magical spell-structures there were no waste products, no planned obsolescence and practically limitless possibilities.
What I needed now was a better way to store, sort and access information gathered by the Infoscope - some sort of a library-like mental space that would allow me to review memories with greater ease. Surely, such a thing was possible to create with the intelligence of [87] [+89]? Especially considering that [87] and [89] were conceptually separate.
To start off my creation of a calculator based on the growing [87 intelligence] stat, I examined it using the Infoscope as a standalone concept.
I imagined it as my BESM-6 supercomputer at the Soviet Computational Research Institute in Moscow as I began working on it as a standalone spell, visualizing and memorizing the entire Omnicode fractal.
It was a lot of effort on my part, but after three weeks of work I was rewarded with what I thought was a potentially functional spell. I pushed mana into it and the fractal ignited, becoming visible in my Infoscope as a brilliant silver-blue, neuron-like structure that folded into itself.
[Tu du!]
The System resounded with a ding that sounded suspiciously like the noise that BESM-6 made when it was turned on.
[New Intelligence-based skill unlocked: [Computational Intelligence] Slot it to activate!]
Yes! That’s it. I eagerly shoved [Computational Intelligence] into the empty skill slot.
For the next several weeks I edited the [Computational Intelligence] spell, entwining Omnicode fractals such as [Stability], [Clarity], [Recollection], [Library], [Computer], [Order] into the spell, until I was able to raise it to [Computational Intelligence LV 10] in the Soul-Song translator-simplified evaluation of it.
Once it was activated, I began to test it.
“Derive the root of 982121?” I asked my [Computational Intelligence] a fairly difficult mathematical question.
[991.020181429]
It answered me with a System message.
Yes! It works!
Inspired by my success, I memorized and added more Omnicode fractals to make [Computational Intelligence] into something greater than a basic soul-calculator.
It took me another two weeks to combine [Computational Intelligence] with the [Infoscope] and the [Visualize memory] omnicode fractals to produce a System window through which I was able to peer at my memories.
After test 1026 of [Visual Computational Intelligence], it actually began to display semi-coherent images within the Infoscope. When the images became sharp and discernible, I gave the improved skill a new name - [NeuroVista].
“NeuroVista, show me my vacation in the Ural mountains, spring of 1959,” I asked.
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A perfectly square window opened up in my mental perception. It had the view of the Urals as I had remembered them once.
A group of nine people were walking on skis across the snow-covered landscape. Snowdrop flowers bloomed beneath the glacier peaks upon fields that our Soviet camping group was traversing. Seeing my memory replaying right in front of me made me shudder as I was struck with a deep feeling of nostalgia.
It was just like I remembered it, even if some of the view was a bit smudged. When I turned the Infoscope focused on the smudged areas, they looked like an abstract oil painting. I guessed that this was NeuroVista's way of filling up information which I had long forgotten or hadn’t paid attention to.
With each passing day, I kept improving NeuroVista, adding control mechanisms to be able to rewind memories forward or backward like a VHS tape or put them on pause. My end goal was to make some kind of a memory-space which I could potentially exist in, like a permanent daydream woven from magical currents, observed through the power of the Infoscope.
Visually, NeuroVista looked like a mixture of a neuron and a diatom, its numerous threads connected to various memories that existed within my soul.
Using NeuroVista I was finally able to examine the contents of the letter my mother received and started to learn the local written language. It was fairly basic as far as things went and reminded me of Proto-Kartvelian language with its long, flowing script that lacked capitals.
When I put the [Soul-Song] skill into my menu, it handily translated the words for me.
I had learned that the letter was written by my grandmother Jundaria Hellenia Agamemnon. From the letter I learned that grandmother Hellenia and her husband lived in a large building complex in the capital city of Agamemnon in the Vaddi river delta somewhere far south of our valley. The Helleni family were my grandparents from my father’s side. This meant that my father had taken the Alan family name from my mom.
I briefly pondered whether this was a mere sign of his respect for her or a local cultural quirk that was different from my world. The village didn’t look particularly matriarchal, if anything everyone was relatively equal thanks to magic.
Most of the letter was filled with chatter about my grandmother's health issues, her rooftop garden, the price of beans this summer, gangs fighting in the streets again and various bits of daily life in the big city of Agamemnon. From the tone of the letter, I was able to gather that Jundaria didn’t approve much of Skyisle, since everyone and everything here was limited to level 20. She also wrote that she would not come see her grandchild, because the trip was far too expensive and dangerous due to dragon attacks.
As for what was going on with my grandparents from my mother’s side of the family, I had no idea - they didn’t seem to be living in Skyisle and the letter didn’t mention them at all. The last line of the letter confirmed it. Grandmother Jundaria didn't like my mom:
[I really wish you didn't elope with Cassandra and didn't make an Unbreakable Vow to Goddess Ishira to stay by her side in Skyisle.
We miss you. Hugs and kisses,
~Jundaria Hellenia Agamemnon]
I contemplated the last three sentences of the letter. An unbreakable Vow? To a Goddess? Was this some kind of common wedding declaration people in love did? If it was literally Unbreakable did it mean that magic itself or the System somehow reinforced dad's love for mom?
Kopusha's memories in me were exceptionally perturbed by this revelation. The Gods had won the war. The fact that people still made Unbreakable Vows was a bad sign. Vows were dangerous business.
Was there a price that was paid to make such a Vow truly unbreakable? Were there rewards to be acquired? Could it be weaponized?
I thought to myself, receiving no answers.
The extremely degraded soul-remnants of the Alanian Acolyte and the Dryad didn't want to think about the Vows, were simply terrified of them. I, on the other hand, wasn't afraid of the Gods, since I wasn't brutally murdered by their misguided minions. If the local 'deities' were visible magical manifestations, then they could be mathematically defined, identified with the Infoscope, and perhaps even severed with Sectus akin to a spell formation!
I put figuring out Vows and Gods on my list of things to investigate in the future. My list of things to do was getting quite long.
The fact that people were able to go above level 20 outside of Skyisle gave me hope. The leveling issue seemed to be geographic and localized to a specific area.
I wondered if there was something near Skyisle that was screwing up the System and not letting people level up.
As I examined my sister with the Infoscope to check on her health, I noted that she was a
[Level 3 female - human - foetus]
Was she leveling up in the womb somehow too?
This was a problem as all of the children I identified with the Infoscope in the village below twelve years of age were [Level 0].
The only potential hypothesis I could think of was that my unborn sister was somehow leeching experience or levels from me. The binding spell of an unknown party that I had failed to fully sever was likely responsible for it.
Theoretically... I could attack the spell again with Sectus, but then if I screwed things up or overshot it, my actions could damage her soul or even rip her soul out of her body, which I really didn't want to do.
The binding spell sat very deep within both of our souls, and was barely visible in my Infoscope, looking like a golden, transparent thread of some sort that existed on an exceptionally deep level of the Astral Ocean.
I decided to leave it alone, hoping to resolve the issue in the future.