“Systemmy, did I ever tell you that I love you?” I jokingly confessed my feelings.
Yep, I’ve assigned her a gender. One of the quirks of Russian language was the specific gendering of every noun. To a Russian speaker a door is immediately perceived as feminine [she], while a table is seen as masculine [he] and a wheel is an [it]. Grammatical gendering like that existed in a bunch of Indo-European languages, including French, Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, German and many, if not all, Slavic languages.
“You’re making me a far smarter man than I’ve ever been!” I sprinkled further compliments at 'her'. "I don't know what I did to deserve such generosity!"
She didn’t respond, as per her usual. I was fine with this sort of relationship - I loved obedient computer algorithms. In fact, the dumber they were, the easier it was to find out what made them tick.
The improved, multi-level, fractal version of [Identify-Visualize-Magnify LV 13] was glorious. I learned to wield my spell like a microscope, focusing it inward on myself. As a virologist I knew what things looked like at a million-power magnification and this knowledge had allowed me to easily direct it deeper into myself.
I gave this improved spell a new name - [The Infoscope]. It was a reference to the work of Vladimir K. Zworykin, the Russian-American inventor of the iconoscope. Dr. Zworykin's iconoscope was an early electronic camera tube used to scan an image for the transmission of television. It had laid the foundation for the Electron microscope that used a beam of accelerated electrons as a source of illumination.
My Infoscope was now nearly as complex as the ESEM Electron microscope. Esmy was one of my favorite tools in the Bioweapons laboratory. It was a depressing fact that Soviet microscopy science had unfortunately fallen far behind the west, so we had to order Esmy from East Berlin contacts in 1988. Thanks to her, I saw the alien beauty of viruses with my own eyes.
The most fascinating fact about Viruses was that many Soviet scientists did not consider them living things. Viruses are basically microscopic machines - complicated assemblies of molecules, proteins, nucleic acids, lipids, and carbohydrates.
Viruses do not consume any form of nourishment or expel waste, they do not grow and they cannot reproduce independently. Max Delbrück, German–American biophysicist, described the basic "life cycle" of a virus in 1937: rather than "growing", a virus particle is assembled from its constituent pieces in one step.
When a virus encounters a living cell, it attaches to it and injects its own DNA or RNA. The cell copies the viral data which makes more of the virus. These reproduced viruses now break out of the host cell, often destroying it in the process and infecting nearby cells. Rinse and repeat, until there are no more cells to inject.
All of these steps are predefined by the nature of the molecules that comprise the virus. Viruses don’t choose, respond, employ, evade or exploit - they follow a very specific program akin to a computer command. For all of their danger, RNA viruses are completely at the mercy of their environment and anyone willing to modify them.
Likewise, the original [Identify] spell was made of mana currents moving in a very specific way and it was now completely at the mercy of my modifications. I had torn it apart bit by bit, building atop its base foundation, adding new things to it with every iteration until it satisfied my needs and became my Infoscope.
I metaphorically pierced my flesh with the Infoscope and dove into myself. I identified my skin cells, veins and organs. I mathematically and visually perceived rivers of blood cells rushing down my veins. I witnessed the furnace of life within myself as my cells divided and increased in number.
I traced the lines of my forming nervous system and identified my growing bones. I learned the Omnicode names for each of my developing organs.
The more I identified, the deeper I could go and because my growing body was constantly growing new cells, the observation and identification of them all was providing me with plentiful experience.
I peered through the cellular membrane witnessing mitochondria and ribosomes. I examined each cell nucleus in great detail, noting the location of chromosomes. The average grown human body has approximately 724 trillion cells. As a foetus I still had a long way to go, but nevertheless I had more than enough cells to observe in their splendor of continuous growth and replication.
When I was a teenager and the great war was coming to its inevitable end, I could walk to the V. I. Lenin State Library without the fear of being pulverized by a German bomb. There, beneath shining lanterns, sitting at a green desk, day by day, I studied the great accomplishments of Soviet engineers. Gargantuan hydroelectric dams that were being built across our super-nation, the Moscow Canal, Magnitogorsk, the Baltic White Sea Canal. Moscow itself was changing around me, buildings were being relocated, avenues were widened and the Seven Sisters skyscrapers were rising into the sky. I kept that feeling of being able to accomplish anything in my heart since those happy teenage days.
Magic was incredible! It allowed me to do the impossible, to bend the laws of the universe at will, to create things the access to which I didn't even have. I could observe cells without the bulky and ridiculously expensive and finicky electron microscope! Potentially limitless possibilities of the future were being unlocked to me.
What did I learn from leveling up? The formula for experience was [level + 1]^2 x [50]. The formula for Investiture points was [level] x [5]. With every evolution it would be harder to reach the next level, unless the formula changed. Going from something like Level 999 to Level 1000 would require 50 million experience points!
I spent the following weeks memorizing more levels of the info-fractals for Identify and Modify. It shot my [Infoscope] to Level 17.
I was pretty sure now that I had found a way to cheat the system. Nearly frying my soul-brain to memorize spell formulas was definitely worth it.
I pointed the Infoscope at itself once again, identifying it visually. It appeared in my mind as a ghostly construct akin to a fractal with many tentacles. Each of the tentacles broke into smaller lines that shimmered with even smaller lines of Omnicode and those lines broke down into even smaller lines of data. It was truly beautiful! I spun it about, feeling proud of what I had created.
The spell definitely looked akin to a coronavirus now, but with longer and more uneven threads, that were able to unfold outward.
It worked in the following manner - the threads could extend outward and identify stuff by touching it and when they came back to the core, the Identify spell processed information about whatever it was scanning and sent it back to me via the channel that tied it to my soul.
I pondered how I could improve the design of the Infoscope. Could I point it at my own thoughts? What were my thoughts? Did they already echo inside Blankie’s organic brain as actual neural patterns?
I started to mess with Omnicode to make the Infoscope perceive my brain activity.
----------------------------------------
It took me quite a long time to arrive at the necessary code fractal, but after weeks of trial and error I was able to point the Infoscope at specific parts of my own brain. I saw that it was indeed expressing, echoing my thoughts as neural patterns. Using this data, I attempted to point the Infoscope at concepts, words and ideas, learning how various Omnicode patterns represented them. Months flew by as I tried to understand my own brain and studied the language of the System concept by concept.
The relentless mental labor showered me with XP and pushed me towards the next level. I initiated the level up.
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. . .
[New skill slot gained!]
Name:
_______ Alan Skyisle
Age:
[12 weeks]
Species & Subtype:
Male - human - foetus
Affinity:
Astral Phantom [Various stat bonuses from subsumed soul-shards and affiliated affliction]
Spark of the Morningstar [+ 3 skill channels] [+ Soul-Song skill]
Dryad [+Chrysalis skill]
Level:
4
Experience:
7/1250
Health:
4/4
Stamina:
4/4
Mana:
4/4
Mana regen:
4 m/hr
Strength:
0
Agility:
0
Dexterity:
0
Vitality:
0 [+3]
Charisma:
0
Magic:
0 [+3]
Foresight:
15
Intelligence:
15 [+89]
Wisdom:
0
Soul:
1 [+3] [-5]
Skills:
[Soul-Song LV 0] [ON]
[Raising Spell efficiency by 0.1%]
[Providing detailed Soul-Stats]
[Translating the Soul-Song's Language]
Known Song-Spells:
[Tamus-Anima] [Sectus-Anima] [Conjugo-Anima] [Identify]
[Infoscope LV 17]
[Chrysalis LV 4] [PAUSED]
[Sectus-Tether LV 4]
-
Investiture points:
20
I spent 2 points to fix my Soul setting things to, as the ache was starting to get on my nerves akin to a headache.
Soul:
1 [+5] [-5]
The rest I dumped into Intelligence, bringing it to:
Intelligence:
33 [+89]
I kept up my study of the language of Magic, delving deeper into Omnicode fractals.
I shoved Modify into the empty Skill slot creating:
[Modify LV 0]
At 33 [+89] Intelligence my memory was becoming crystal clear, almost photographic. As my knowledge of Omnicode grew by leaps and bounds, so did the complexity of my Infoscope. I was no longer a blind man randomly groping in the dark for control knobs, but it was still too early to call myself the master of Omnicode. The language of magic was far too maddeningly complex for me to grasp in its entirety and for nearly six months of hard work, I had barely managed to scratch the surface and truly mastered only one word in it - Identify.
Thanks to my ongoing modifications of the Infoscope, I could now see colors!
My window into the world was no longer white & blue.
I wanted to see viruses, but couldn't find any in myself. I was completely virus free at this point because of the placenta. The placenta inside of my mom was extra powerful, likely affected by her high Vitality stats. It nourished and protected me by blocking out all pathogens from crossing the maternal-fetal barrier. It was nice, but also annoying as I wanted to study how to fight local diseases by observing local viruses. For example, if an infection was bacterial I could design a Bacteriophage virus army to defeat it.
The smallest thing my Infoscope could observe was inter-molecular bonding and even then the view started to get pretty blurry no matter how I adjusted it. Thanks to my Soviet education and the study of radiation and its impacts on people at the Semipalatinsk nuclear Test Site, I knew the basics about atoms and nuclear physics. I spent a few weeks identifying the atoms within myself, hoping to someday learn how to potentially modify matter on the atomic scale.
The cost of modifying a single atom theoretically would be quite minute, since it was so tiny.
From the Soviet Journal of Quantum Electronics, I knew that atoms could be manipulated one at a time with an electron beam. Quantum electrodynamics, aka the relativistic quantum field theory of electrodynamics was a fascinating topic for me. I wondered if trying to push the Infoscope to see things that were smaller than atoms was affecting or messing up what I was observing.
As much as I wanted to play with atoms, I also knew that it would be a pretty terrible idea to mess with the atoms inside of myself. I simply didn't know enough about atoms not to screw things up horribly.
What I required was a way to move the Infoscope to some really far away and desolate place for such... tests.
With this in mind, I set out to design a new spell, one called the [Info-Tether]. It would allow me to establish a direct vector-beam of information between my Infoscope and myself. It would allow me to move my all-seeing, all-identifying spell far away from myself.
Regardless of my accomplishments, mild anxiety was beginning to nip at my heels, brought on by months of repetitious mental labor and loneliness.
I badly wanted to know what was outside of the womb. I needed to turn my Infoscope outward to identify what my mom looked like, see where she lived. Peering at my growth for weeks on end was really interesting, but my birth was an inevitability and it was better to be ready for whatever awaited me out there.
In another few weeks of design and testing the Info-Tether was finally done. I added it to my skills.
I added a stretching [Info-Tether LV 0] line to the Infoscope construct, connecting the ghostly jellyfish to my body and tried to pilot it away from myself. It now functioned like an endoscope, allowing me to identify and perceive various things within the amniotic fluid as I moved it about.
The fluid contained a variety of waste, proteins, carbohydrates, lipids and phospholipids, urea and amniotic stem cells. There were a lot of stem cells in the womb, aiding my growth.
I carefully directed the Infoscope construct out of the womb, passing through flesh and organs. I observed the intricate, organic beauty of my mom’s body from within, as if it was unlocked to me in all of its splendor. It was different, bigger, more complex than mine as all of her nerves, muscles, bones and organs were already developed. One didn’t grow up to be a biochemist without great appreciation for anatomy. My mother seemed like a healthy human as far as I could determine from my strange vantage point.
The Infoscope identified her as [Cassandra Alana Skyisle - Agromancer: Lv 20].
I attempted to Identify my mom's other stats, hoping to see more than her level. It didn't work. The Infoscope simply flickered and crashed, draining nearly all of my mana in the process. I guessed that maybe she had some sort of a defense skill against such sneaky information-gathering.
Once my mana had rejuvenated, I created another Infoscope and shot it out of myself, flying it through my mom once again.
For a few moments I hovered at the edge of her skin, a bit worried about going forward. What had awaited me outside? Cavemen? The Renaissance? Magical space communism? How advanced were the people of Novazem? What if they noticed my Infoscope? I pushed my construct ahead, slowly and cautiously passing through layers of my mom’s skin.