---Richard---

Richard was in a strange sort of fugue of knowledge and discoveries. It had started simply enough. A vague plan of hacking the network the guild had set up and defacing it or some shit. Maybe air any dirty laundry he found to show off how corrupt they were. Just a goal – random challenge to work towards.

Nothing was unhackable after all and if a player from the guild made the achievement website there was nothing saying he shouldn’t be able to break into it.

Of course the ai implants – including the one the website was hosted on – were nested however many layers of abstraction deep and he didn’t understand how they even functioned…so that’s why he was now sitting in computer science classes with children.

In front of the teacher, a teaching implement sat. it looked like a toy – a three by three set of metal balls stuck on short poles and attached to a square plate. Each ball had a glowing strip roughly a third of the way down it and the teacher had passed it around the room as they talked.

The teacher's lecture was recorded in real time – the closed captioning translated automatically for Richard to follow along. He had the translation appearing in his implant – a scroll of text running down the side of his vision.

“The base of modern code is held in that block. Nine trits form a single tryte. Can anyone tell me the number of integers in a tryte?” The teacher asked causing a smug little twelve year old to hold up his hand in glee.

“A Trit can hold three values and there are three by three of them – so in base three, the max number of values is three to the nine or 19683. For extra credit, the first value is commonly zero, so the maximum integer is 19682.”

The teacher laughed and nodded. “No extra credit for that but thank you for being thorough. Yes, a single tryte can hold 19683 values. That’s enough to hold every single common assembly code point! Before we go into the most important assembly instructions I’m going to go a step deeper. Does anyone know why a trit is the base we use? Why not base 4? Base 10? Base 2?”

The class was silent.

Well that’s obvious right? They have a hard on for threes and want to force everything into threes no matter how little it makes sense.

Richard raised his hand.

“Yes! Our outsider in the back – please send your answer to my interface so I can read it off.” The teacher called back to him.

Eyes glazing as he read Richard’s response quickly the teacher laughed. “Not quite but ‘three is the best number’ is a common answer to the question. Besides it being the lowest prime that counts – one and two don’t count as far as I’m concerned – besides its compactness there’s a hardware reason.”

The three by three training tool reached the front and the teacher swapped it out for a large crystal ball. Some sort of holographic interface projected over top of it and showed a single ball of light slowly bouncing back and forth inside of it following a sin wave. Quickly speeding up the ball of light became a glowing line directly through the crystal.

“This right here is a representation of a phase crystal. As you can see its currently aligned from the front to back.”

Pulling out what looked like a magnet the teacher began dragging it around the outside of the crystal showing how it changed the direction the line was pointing.

“Phase crystals are stable forms of stored directional energy. They are locked to a single oscillating direction as shown in the representation and remain in that direction until changed by an external force. The phase of the crystal – as this direction is called – can be both read to various accuracies and altered to various accuracies depending on the technology used and the size and shape of the crystal. Most aether based devices contain several larger phase crystals – at least three times if not hundreds of times larger – solely for analogue calculations. There’s ways of averaging the phase between two phase crystals or performing three dimensional vector math across dozens of crystals simultaneously.”

The teacher began adding holograms to the end of his ball collapsing them back into the ball each time showing how the ‘phase’ changed.

“Phase crystals and operations can be used entirely separate from programming to track or intercept objects in space. Most of reality exists using three dimensional values and analogue storage in this default makes for efficient calculations.

“Computers however contain millions to trillions of microscopic phase crystals some only a few dozen atoms in size. At those scales, the accuracy of altering and measuring the phase of a phase crystal drop to incredibly thin margins. We can only really work in an ‘up/down, left/right, back/front’ system at that point, those three sectors translating to a single trit. Does anyone know an exception to the rule?”

The class was silent.

“I’m not surprised but I’d have hoped some of you might have guessed. It’s the same answer as a lot of limitations. The answer is that active aether sources can break some of these hard and fast rules. Trits are relatively stable unpowered and when used to store static information or perform calculations without an aether connection they are referred to as non-volatile forms of memory. When aether link is introduced, each cell can suddenly retrieve a much wider range of values including intensity. (I, θ, Φ) is the form this method of memory is denoted.

“Aether based energy transfer and manipulation links large banks of memory together and, when actively infusing everything, each cell can suddenly store and retrieve a variable range of values above those three. This active case is known as RAM or volatile memory and can grow exponentially with the strength and quality of the slot connected to it. this is why high ranks have much better AI’s – they actually have the same base devices but their potential is much higher due to all the abilities aether unlocks. Quantum calculations for example with certain methods of linking memory banks and operations…

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“The easiest improvement is storage space. Most AI’s have roughly a teratrite of stable storage. With volatile storage and a good enough stream of aether that flips up to exatrites of storage easy – just so long as the owner doesn’t cut flow to their devices and start decaying their memory banks.” The teacher paused for a moment as if watching everyone.

“So to reiterate. Non aether devices use trinary logic on nine trites.” Pulling the previous devie out the teacher spun each ball to different positions showing how each ball held three values.”

“All prebaked and manual code runs off this system and it's where we will be directing our focus for the next few lessons. For common programs theres a load of logic that works really nicely with three values. Yes, No and maybe are the base of trinary. Our first lesson will go over K-Maps and early fuzzy logic – yes I see I finally have a question”

The teacher paused then nodded answering.

“We will not bother learning the code for aether devices because it doesn’t exist. All active AI applications are…self grown. Reinforcement learning and self modifying program seeds optomize themselves to each user. None of the advanced programs are written by kin hands, they are all a derivative of generative design practices. All you have to know is that allows some of the most complex devices in modern life to fit in a space smaller than your finger. If that is the last question I will send everyone worksheets now.” The teacher flipped questions to everyones AI’s then took a moment to rest by the window.

And Richard despaired slightly. His goal…he figured he could probably find a loophole or hack something made by humans with the same tools as him but…hacking what sounded like a living organism? Hacking a black box that even the creators didn’t understand?

…that might be beyond him.

…

Richard was in a fugue of information. He had reached a tipping point – a point where he finally began to understand the principles behind a lot of aether technology and it felt like there was a literal endless amount of bits he could learn.

All thoughts of hacking the guild were forgotten as Richard learned computer science and chemistry and esper interaction and material synthesis.

It was almost surprising how little aether actually did – the complexity in all these fields and in the devices made with them was the same complexity the non aether fields held just multiplied by another factor.

Or…instead of multiplied it was squared or even cubed. It was like imagining every possible part of chemistry as a separate technique…and then the number of techniques when introducing the few changes aether made cubed the number of techniques. He really wanted to go to a lab or tour one of the factories that made ai chips or similar – those were in the capital but that could be taken if he took one of the weekly expeditions there.

He hadn’t just learned passively – Richard wasn’t one to sit endlessly on theoretical knowledge he wanted to actually prove his stuff.

Even simple reactions like combustion functioned differently when exposed to aether and Richard could totally see how someone ignorant might look at the whole field as magic. But no, it was science and Richard was a huge fan. He had loved science and still loved it to this day – a brief run in with the realities of the world might have led him astray but no longer! Science was cool! Mad science was even cooler! And finally confirming that skills were basically strange chemical reactions was deeply deeply satisfying.

Passive skills were more like continuous reactions. Active skills were batch reactions. Active skills were stronger because they could build up a storage of energy to use all at once.

It all just clicked.

Which led to his current experimental setup.

To start he had focused on one of the fundamental abilities aether provided. Aether could alter energy – and matter because matter was simply another form of energy. Converting between the two was more complicated than many options and many attempts at creating matter from nothing but energy simply resulted in…solid energy that decayed to nothing afterwards. Psudo matter – something he totally wanted to study at some point but…

Richard was distracted once again.

He had gone to school for chemical engineering – Richard hadn’t gotten far into it yet the first year of engineering was mostly general knowledge with all the fields combined but he did have a good grasp of the subject.

Now learning just how much of aether was chemistry he fell into the deep end with learning as much as he could. He ran the toxic dungeon – not for fun or strength but simply for funds.

A quick pop through the dungeon could give him a thousand dollars or so in a hour or two and a steady stream of that kind of money opened the world of devices to him.

And with those devices he had built this lab.

He had started simple. No organic compounds – organic chem back home was already black magic he didn’t even want to look at it when aether was involved.

No Richard had started with a single element and then shifted to include compounds made with that element.

Aether directed aether and with that he was able to observe this transfer of energy. It wasn’t nessisarily an instantaneous process nor a simple start and end.

It was a reaction. A reaction with byproducts. A reaction with multiple steps.

Playing around with that Richard figured out how to begin to convert his element of choice – nitrogen and nitrates – and figured out how to begin its conversion to something else.

Jumping partway through the reaction Richard found he could attach it to a different form – and once it was removed from the reaction it would revert. Combining this Richard had a strange gun shaped contraption that would basically convert nitrates to light, shoot that light across the room and then revert it back to the nitrate again.

He was currently using it to draw a dick on the wall – the salt half embedding into it and working like a laser pointer that left a trail behind it. A thick white beam of light that was visible in the air…and a piece of art to rival the louvre.

The nitrate he was currently using was just a salt…but some nitrates were explosives. It wouldn’t take much to make a beam of light that deposited nitroglycerin far away.

And explosions made everything so much more fun.

Richard finished his art piece then reviewed his other major project.

After gaining more slots and learning more of AI’s he now had his constantly running. Running but doing nothing was useless so he had put it to work. To start he had ‘downloaded’ nearly all the publicly available knowledge and stored it like a offline copy of Wikipedia. That had been an achievement – something he had nearly forgotten was a thing. Next he had discovered a way of better feeling and measuring aether movement inside his own body…and then he had worked on his foundation mutation.

He could grow a skill from scratch. He could observe the skill being grown. He could record and study the readings using his ai. And while he didn’t know the possibilities yet having a skill germinate slowly while his AI watched and predicted things was a hell of an experiment. Using the strange energy to study itself was fitting in a way. The information he was getting back had been part of what gave him his nitrate gun.

Having a super computer attached to your mind was a hack. The ultimate cheat.

Or in other words Richard had a new toy and reverted to a child as he played with it.

Life is fun.