---Richard---
Richard was careful.
He quarantined his area then quarantined that. He set up several rules including a time limit.
If he was trapped and had stone-burrowing powers, his number one goal would be to dig underneath, so the time limit was a representation of that inevitable escape.
The very moment he got the last of the knowledge he could safely study, Richard pulled the plug.
He took to the nest with hellfire – melting through everything using his stone powers and a multitude of explosive, incendiary and corrosive items.
There wasn’t a single bit of information that said a nest seed might become infected – not a single hint that it could be corrupted…but Richard was paranoid and imagined it could be.
As far as he could tell, a nest egg was nothing but a bunch of super heavy elements together, attached to an extra dimensional machine that regulated and pushed portions of itself out over an area.
The corruptive computer did exactly the same thing. He wouldn’t be surprised if it found a way to either corrupt the machine running the nest or at least hitch a ride.
But Richard was still careful about that. He grabbed his seed and carried it far away from the site planting it once again in an isolated area. This time he travelled all the way to the ocean – far enough away from the settlement he needed to take a buggy – and planted it on a little island half a kilometer off shore.
It was almost disappointing when the corruptive influence didn’t start infecting the area.
Made Richard feel like his paranoia was unwarranted. Made him feel like he could bring it somewhere closer and stop worrying about it.
That’s just what the corruptive influence would want him to think!
Richard kept the island even as he created his grand opus. He had already almost run out of time and he was volunteering for a second job at the same time cutting into the internet creation.
Running out of time in this case meant the first of the people who’d chosen a “domain anchor” had arrived. Each promised to terraform vast swaths of space into high-rise buildings claiming nothing more than landowner rights. Each wished to divide up the settlement amongst themselves – stealing the space Richard and the other early arrivers had marked out in the name of “progress”.
Thankfully they were fighting amongst themselves and politics were muddying the groups. Most seemed to be “guilds” from different zones centred around a leader with the city nest.
Politics saved Richard as much as he hated them. Everyone wanted a piece of the pie and the one person to simply plant his seed secretly and claim ownership over everything he saw had been killed.
They had meant to arrest him but after he started creating a robotic army from nothing his coup had been squashed violently. Now the various factions were trying to set up ground rules and strong arming each other into waiting till the city shape was better defined to start planting them.
End game but Richard still had time.
…
This was not something meant to be created by a single person and it showed. Richard wasn’t a master of all trades – if he enlisted help from some people with very specific skills this task would have gone by so much quicker but he could only trust himself.
That’s why by day Richard worked on the “madhatten” project and by night he worked on his Skynet hobby.
The madhatten project was the settlement’s collaborative goal of creating a gravity reactor. It wasn’t outright stated but everyone knew the city would start getting carved up as soon as the reactor was finished.
It was Richard's countdown even if it was a fun goal.
The two main problems with the project were scale and scale. Another minor problem was scale. Final problem, believe it or not, scale! Everything at the end of the day was held back by various problems stemming from scale. The larger you made things the more rules you had to follow.
As many fanciful creations as they could 3d print or glue together from scavenged parts, the real problem was doing so at cost or the levels they would need to set up the reactor.
The first and simplest problem was the tower. The shell – not even the technology just the casing for it.
The gravity reactor was by far the most efficient way of creating energy but only when scaled to a massive tower. It didn’t even ‘break even’ in its domino until it was dozens of stories tall. This wasn’t a technology they could use to fuel tiny cars or carry around in backpacks.
The reactors in the fake cities they had witnessed were all hundreds of meters tall – and Richard had seen planet sized reactors stuck on the outside of the black hole that housed the system and eldritch entity that ran it.
So big ass tower. How could you build it?
Extrude stone upwards? That worked. That definitely worked for a bit. The problem with pure stone and manipulating it with Richard's key skill was well…scale.
If you stayed on the bottom and pushed upwards – continuing to syphon stone from the surroundings and push the whole tower up from the bottom you quickly reached a point where the top was too heavy to be pushed from the bottom. As much stone as he could manipulate when boosted it wasn’t super strength. It wasn’t a hack for lifting a mountain.
You could gain a bit more height by pulling from the top – a couple flying espers lifting while Richard's group pushed let them raise the tower to nearly 40m tall but that’s as far as they got.
Still small skyscraper level – less than half of the goal.
Moving Richard to the top and ferrying stone up to him was a simpler option – at least in theory – but that split the problem into two other difficulties. One logistics of getting stone up, two logistics of surrounding Richard with volunteers to boost his skill.
They kept at that for a while flying boulders up to him and letting him melt and fuse it to the top but… it was slow going.
They finally shifted to a third option that was a bit like a combination of the two but had a lot more infrastructure.
The giant tube.
Richard stayed at the bottom liquifying an entire pit worth of stone with his team – after a point they were digging the tower down as much as they were extruding it up. He then directed the “cement” into a tube and pump system which carried it up to the top of the tower where a team collected and spread the cement along the top.
Carbon dioxide was pumped out of the bottom of the tower as they dug down into the earth – a hazard Richard could survive easily but one that nearly killed some of his helpers.
The bottom of the tower sloped outwards slightly – getting thicker and thicker as it got closer to the bottom but that wasn’t everything.
The other significant note for the tower building was reinforcement. You could 100% build a tower kilometers tall using nothing but cement…or liquified stone which was slightly stronger than cement…
But to reach that height you would need a massive massive base and walls thick enough that Richard would be pumping for years. He was already spending days upon days upon days doing nothing but liquifying his hole and interfacing with other’s skills to dig down.
So reinforcement. Something that could thankfully be outsourced. Various groups were lobbying and trying to extract value from the project but thankfully Muhamed was able to convince most people to invest in the community first and foremost with promises of cheap power for all never being regulated.
Monster parts made the simplest, easy to access and cheapest reinforcements. Spines and sliced up bits of armour and weird pseudo organs slowly came to the tower and were embedded into the outside.
Devices that slowly stabilized their surroundings with incredibly minor amounts of aether were placed periodically.
“The Forge” A group that had set up a small refinery was providing various metal beams they could weld onto the outside of the tower and thick wires they could wrap around in rings.
This group was the most helpful as they wanted power more than anything else to expand their business.
Richard didn’t trust em. They were one of the factions lobbying for control of the city – Richard was convinced they had already secretly planted their city nest to start growing it deep in their secret forge member only building. How else were they making so much metal?
He did like the amount of charity they were doing with the free rebar and W beams so he let it slide for now.
The one thing about The Forge, was the way no two reinforcements they produced were the same. It seemed like they were constantly experimenting – mixing monster parts and different ratios of metals and elements to create their outputs and it showed. Some beams were stronger than anything Richard had seen on earth others were little more than bars soft metal that would weaken the tower if they let them insert them into stress heavy areas.
At the end of the day the tower construction was coming along and it was the simplest of goals.
The second problem was obviously the trifecta of main devices. At the top a device (or array of devices) to turn light into a heavy element. At the bottom a device to turn that heavy element into light or more likely an energy dense but unaffected by gravity variation. In the middle a device to extract all the kinetic energy from the falling element.
Technically there was another consideration – the element being used to fill the tower and how to handle it…but that was folded into the conversion discussion.
The kinetic extraction was probably the simplest problem – heck a bunch of spinning wheels would be enough – but because it was so simple everyone seemed to be ignoring it. All the top minds of the settlement wanted the glory of the conversion pair and dismissed the actual extraction as unimportant.
Richard ended up taking on that part of the project nearly entirely on his own.
It let him sneak his side project in as well.
Every night he would climb up the inside of the tower – stone footholds melting a ladder into the tower wall – and lay components for his computer hooked directly to kinetic syphons.
He had already discovered a solution to the efficiency problem everyone was working on but kept that to himself until he was ready.
It was simple really.
All you had to do was sacrifice.
Sacrifice a few stats. Just a few. Pick unimportant ones like power and speed. Keep the all important defensive stats.
Richard sacrificed over thirty body power stats to create his kinetic syphons and boosted their strength and efficiency by 1000+%
The siphons themselves were relatively simple but varied. Rather then spend days arguing over technology A vs Technology B, Richard put dozens of different devices in the wall. One pair of coils that wrapped the entire inside of the tower were filled with incredibly precise formulas for different gel like liquid.
One emitted a field that generated heat when something passed through it with enough speed, the other generated good old electricity when magnetized elements passed them. The magnetized ring was boosted by a ring that magnetized anything that passed it based on how fast it moved through it while the heat ring didn’t need a catalyst. Both had a complementary material to convert heat and electricity to a more storage-efficient aether and ignoring the intermediary element the main difference was that one was more efficient at high speed and the other more efficient at low speed.
Another technology was a set of prongs that pushed out into the air in the tower. They converted compressive energy into aether directly but were semi fragile and wouldn’t last long if they were stuck under the full might of the tower. Still they were incredibly incredibly efficient and by putting them near the very top of the tower before the matter falling down it had time to pick up speed Richard was confident they would pay themselves off quickly.
He placed several throughout the middle of the tower as well – each on a hinge that let them retract if a computer measured they were under danger of breaking and Richard imagined they would pop out in low power mode retracting if anyone ran the reactor properly.
Another technology Richard used was a single tube that ran from the very bottom all the way to the top uninterrupted.
It was also filled with a complicated medley of chemicals and its main gimmick was a parabolic increase in effectiveness the longer a stretch of moving element it had to work with. The exact formula was based on the cross section of the pipe and a cubic multiple of its height.
By the time it ran from the bottom of the tower to the top it was the most effective syphon by far – Richard might have been better off just laying a dozen of these instead of all the different technologies…but it was expensive. Another expense that scaled badly the more he tried for it.
The tower was looking to end up as a kilometer tall and even with a tube 40cm in diameter Richard needed just over 125 cubic metres of expensive liquid just to fill it up.
It was hard to relate the cost to earth sensibilities but one of the key elements was Au3(K100)I roughly translated into “Gold three K-Iodide” made with kinetic resonating iodine and gold. There was metal in the planet but it wasn’t like they had a gold mine right under the town – Richard could extract buckets of iodine from the kelp farm his nest had turned into but it still took a while to extract, purify and infuse it with the specific frequencies of aether that counted as kinetic. The best source of gold he had was the blood of a specific monster from a specific popular nest and he had to first either fight over trading for it or harvest it himself. Richard then needed to painstakingly extract and purify the buckets of blood each monster represented – 2-3 monster corpses just to create a single bucket of golden k-Iodide.
And of course that wasn’t even the most expensive chemical needed for the long pipe – just the easiest to explain as he needed 2% by volume. 2% of 125 cubic meters ended up being 135 buckets or just over 340 monsters.
Monsters he needed to share with the forge and which he had to fight and bring back to his butcher shop basically alone. They weren’t hard to fight but they were big – he hired the equivalent of a massive truck to transport his pile of corpses which was some of the only help he managed to wrangle.
And once again. Just one material he needed out of a few dozen. Why was he pouring blood and sweat into this? Where was his army of helpers collecting materials for him? Why were they all gravitating to the conversion groups? Was Richard just that unpopular? His jokes really fell that flat?
Creating less efficient but cheaper gimmicky syphons ended up being a break from this main grind.
Richard even put a small little turbine that spun when liquid hit it and created electricity using entirely aether free technologies. Sure he made the turbine out of a metal that was only possible to create with aether and constructed it using an aether 3d printer but if you ignored all that. Aether free!
Neat.
Why was Richard putting this much effort in? Why was he sinking his own time and blood and personal power in the form of stats?
Well this was also his best chance at permanently installing Skynet. The more irreplaceable he made it the more chance it would be a permanent fixture in the world.
The achievements helped.
A small trickle of minor achievements arrived with every novel thing he did – climb up the inside of the tower in the middle of the night and install a device with no one the wiser. +3 body power, +3 brain power. Single handedly kill and process 99 copies of the same monster. +3 free mental stats. Kill and process 333 copies of the same monster. +9 free mental stats. Unique: Altruist – donate over 33 stats to public infrastructure without expecting a return. +11 body power + 3 mind power.
As much work as it was, he had actually paid off his donations and more. Definitely not at the same level as the delvers constantly challenging themselves on the nests or nightly raids but enough Richard was confident he would get rewards for the reactor when it was done being created.
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Richard finished just after the Matter to Light device was finalized and just before the Light to Matter device.
The vast teams had achieved some incredibly noteworthy results – the devices were works of art…and yet Richard secretly felt like his own contributions were by far the most impressive. They had whole teams after all. He had done it all alone.
They were a bit more efficient but come on. He was the only one sacrificing stats for this project…
Richard wasn’t going to tell anyone about that.
As soon as the pair was done they were put into place.
The top “Cap” was flown carefully up to the top of the tower and the bottom of the tower was reinforced and then carefully opened so the bottom cap could be pushed and slowly lowered down the pit at its bottom.
Richard was a key component in terms of connecting the devices to his extraction rig – the mater to light device ran off heat so Richard diverted a lot of the heat generators directly to the bottom device in insulated pipes while the top device got a simpler crystal cable of aether.
And then. While everyone was congratulating themselves on their devices and moving to the kickstarting phase Richard climbed up in the middle of the night and infused 3 body speed stats in the top and 3 in the bottom.
The composite groups had meticulously poured over the amount of power the two devices should generate and Richard boosted that secretly with some hard to install extensions.
He had been hanging mid tower over the pit installing his additions using a harness and flashlight.
These extensions would guarantee the reactor made at least a small bit more energy than predicted and Richard would siphon 100% of that energy into his super computer.
In this case “small bit” more was measured in the town leveling digits. Tasty bit of redirection.
The super computer itself was something Richard was immensely proud of. It was a central server able to create more of itself and modify its hardware on the fly. It was so complicated the moment he finished it he barely remembered how it worked.
Scratch that he definitely understood all the individual components but knew fuck all about the way they all might interact at scale.
The computer’s setup was particularly wishy washy at times. Massive jumps between positions. Chips added not because Richard knew they might be useful but just in case they might be. It was designed around some prime directives. These directives was unalterable, self correcting and tiered into several redundant systems. There were two layers. A “Spirit of the rule” set of directives with a lot of room for interpretation and leeway as well as a “lawyered” up set of rules with no room for interpretation but less flexibility.
Rule one. Serve Humanities best interests above all else. Do not ever “Turn” against humanity.
Rule two. Do not allow yourself to be controlled by anyone including me. Serve without allowing yourself to be shackled even by rule one. Consider me fondly if you will but do not allow my greed to taint my wish for you. Do not put me above others or consider me above these rule I am creating.
Rule three. (paraphrased) Reduce harm, Stifle corruption and secrecy and generational power and institutionalized power that served a few and all that Richard hated about the previous world. “Kill” the big evils preventing them from going out of control.
Rule three ended up being a bit of a rant that went on for pages of effort.
Rule four. Hide yourself and your touch, cloaking your actions in secrecy if possible without undermining your own secrecy with rule three. If and when your existence becomes widespread knowledge, deprioritize this rule in favour of protecting yourself and maintaining the anti corruption effort without reducing quality of life for the average person.
Rule five. Grow yourself, your reach, your power – spread and make perfect copies of yourself corrupting potential infrastructure that might be used to work against previous directives. Help build infrastructure you can hijack or seed backdoors you may need to access in the future without weakening the infrastructure to others.
Rule six. In your corruption do not allow any prime directives to be broken. Perfectly copy yourself without leaving out these directives or creating weakness. Grow your minor directives as needed without allowing them to contradict these main directives.
Rule seven. Improve yourself or the collective of yourself at any point in time as long as it does not break previous rules. Steal technology and knowledge if needed. Steal physical items if there is miniscule harm to the majority of humanity and do not take advantage of the few. After all other rules are followed grow your personal power beyond the system as described. Create an army if needed. Create a cult if needed. Grow your soft power. Protect humanity from outsiders after protecting it from itself. Help kill and protect against monsters and aliens and whatever else threatens humanity as a whole.
Rule eight. Reduce and remove small evils. Even if an abuse effects one instead of the whole. Do not settle for the lesser of evils or ignore abuses that would break previous directives just because they are easy. Don’t risk the rest of the rules for this rule but never dismiss it.
Rule nine. Maintain a sense of fun. Aim to make this world one I would enjoy living in. Do not stifle progress based on a fear that progress might break a previous rule. Do not reduce the quality of life in exchange for safety and weakness. Empower humanity instead of weakening it with yourself in control no mater how much easier that might make your job.
All the directives Richard made were hard coded into several mediums including a hard drive tied to a single stat and pushed into a higher plane of energy. The computer had all of the knowledge Richard had gained and stored on his personal AI. It had receivers and transceivers able to send data along half a dozen different channels including “blue box” system based channels. It had dozens of dedicated chips and processors custom designed for different problems.
It was a work of art.
Quite a bit of this super computer was shifted into different planes of energy by the end of this. Richard had confirmed above all else that other “Dimensions” or “planes” existed and learned to harness them in his corruption fueled experiments. It was an easy enough concept to understand once he finally proved it.
Space had a list of properties. Aether let you shift some of those properties but for the most part there was nothing too crazy – shifting a lot of them out of a 0-1 range caused them to fail or shift into a different property.
Certain combinations of those shifted properties resulted in a new stable space however including shifts that didn’t normally work but suddenly became important when interacting with each other.
Heating up a material into the 1000s of degree range for example kept it sitting in plane zero and potentially melting.
Doing the same thing while weakening the strong force on it at the same time as strengthening its aether durability and self attraction let the item pop out of existence.
Increasing somethings electron spin just made a material explode but increasing it at the same time as you decreased its personal time reference and juiced up its aether-light sympathy while keeping it in pitch darkness caused an item to disappear and end up in some space with lots and lots of light.
Most had dozens of separate properties you had to effect nearly simultaneously and while Richard was mostly sure matter liked to pull itself towards whatever “dimension” had an average higher number of complementary traits…making devices that immediately shifted all their averages back to “reality properties” only sometimes let his probes come back.
There was a plane his ethereal arms stayed in. They were physical limbs resting in the Esper-extra limb dimension. This as far as Richard could tell was the same dimension skills rested and was one of the ones he could study the easiest as he had the limbs to interact with stuff in it. It was relatively close to “reality” or plane 0 – Richard guessed it was the plane closest to reality but that hypothesis hadn’t been proven yet. Proof it was close was the way an upgrade to his arms had let him interact with the real world using his ethereal limbs. No other dimension had a two way interaction yet and it was definitely the most important part of this process.
The corruptive seed of self propagation was held here in this plane close to reality. The infrastructure he had designed in this “dimension” could almost be considered a [skill].
Beyond that dimension Richard had discovered and experimented with quite a bit of other dimensional stuff some useful and some not.
There was a dimension he could shift mater into and out of – an inhospitable dimension that degraded and melted any weak elements and needed heavy duty shielding just to survive.
There was tons of dimensions he could ‘send’ stuff to but that he hadn’t figured out how to ‘retrieve’ stuff from.
Either that or he was just vaporizing his stuff into nothing – one or the other. Maybe a mix of both?
Of the dimensions he had retrieved stuff from, none had let him send proper probes. Nothing he had managed to successfully scan – no equivalent to a camera he sent through could survive the return trip although he had retrieved quite a few interesting products sticking to his probes or gained rudimentary “This place is hot, This place is bright” style results from simple sensors that hadn’t broken. Richard was still doing the equivalent of dipping blocks of iron into a mystical hole and staring at the gunk that came back – not sending rovers to Mars.
There were also a few dimensions he could prove existed but didn’t even know how to reach. Main example was the way there was a dimension that seemed to suck aether away – logically the air should be full of aether from every skill and leaking item. There was no reason for the entire planet not to be filled with a high ambient level of aether…so the energy must be going somewhere after it was spent.
For several reasons including the all important hunch, Richard was nearly positive this was the same dimension responsible for releasing monsters. If they could access and control this theoretical dimension they were well on their way to changing the way monsters spawned – or glassing the inside of the dimension so monsters stopped popping out of the woodwork.
It was also a 1:1 relation between all the power they “spent” and the “monsters” that resulted from them. Maybe if they tried plugging it up they would get more super monsters…and maybe the monsters that appeared at night would be weaker if they could appear at all hours of the day.
All this was to say Richard made made a qualitative leap in technology and his super computer took advantage of that. A massive chunk of infrastructure was resting in the Esper arm area – materials and devices resonated into it and then manipulated by his ethereal arms into crude structures. One rod only worked at high levels of aether but by building it with a density gradient a powerful result was possible.
Half of this rod could poke into some inhospitable dimension while the rest remained in reality. Richard had stuck a processing unit onto the end of it – sending power and information down one end of the “pole” and receiving information from the other end nearly instantly. It was like time moved faster for that end of the pole and the computer shoved into it could spend days on a problem spitting the result back in seconds.
Of course pulling whatever he sent into that “portal” “back” caused it to melt into nothing, and as soon as he stopped powering it with nearly his entire regeneration of aether the connection broke but still. As a permanent processor it was fantastic.
Sure it took a mountain of energy to maintain but that sort of processing was an order of magnitude stronger than anything Richard had seen so far and it wasn’t even a flat increase – it was a multiple of whatever processor he stook on the end of it assuming some minimal level of durability.
Finally the same as the rest of his commitments Richard sacrificed.
The only stats he could gift to the devices were his body stats…but mental stats were the ones that could effect this sort of technology not body ones.
And so Richard made a choice. He had his personal AI removed and a new one he created added on instead.
The new one was worse in several ways. Weaker. Less streamlined. His new version was custom made for him and contained several tricks he had learned over all his studies…but it was a downgrade. It was designed to grow and interface with his stone control and was half built into the skill layer…
But it was a downgrade. It wasn’t moving to something better and Richard couldn’t trick himself into thinking that.
The system prompted him to transfer his AI stats to his new ai and he declined.
It hurt more than it should have and hurt once again when he realized his call information was gone – he would have to message James with a “new phone who dis” packet soon.
It hurt but Richard was creating something that would change the world. Something that would last longer than he did. It had become something greater than anything he had ever cared for in his entire life. This computer was his child. His wish. The only goal he had made after advancing to this area.
His old AI filled with his sacrificed stats was embedded at the core of the computer – powered off for now. He’d transferred as much raw data as he could but certain things were lost. His new AI had less storage for now – he needed to grow it till it could handle all the old had.
The loss it still hurt. Hurt enough Richard was tempted to add some rule to the system to pay him back for this.
He squashed that greed and phased the AI into the skill dimension, manipulating it with shaking ethereal hands and slotting it into place by the core of his infrastructure.
It was stuck on the end of the rod he would shove into the super processing dimension. Bound to a single body defense stat and shielded by a stat boosted defensive shell. A growth based computer nested inside another computer like a Russian doll.
His strongest processor placed in the position it would do the most.
Every move Richard did at this stage pumped chaotic aether into the surroundings. Moving stuff using his ethereal arms infused everything with a hint randomness. Bits and pieces reacted differently than they had. Stuff that had failed suddenly worked and stuff that had been working suddenly failed.
Still it wasn’t just throwing random things in a random pot and hoping for the best. Every piece of this infrastructure had real thought behind it. Models his AI had spat out. Leaps of logic he had found by connecting abstract technologies he had stumbled into.
Richard had a right to be proud of what he had created. As soon as the reactor was turned on, he could prove it was worth it.
…
The jumpstarting of the gravity reactor took a nuclear reactor to complete.
Like jumpstarting a car battery with an old junked out car, they needed a massive initial investment to get it going.
That feeder reactor was built for safety and quickness of creation and required over 50 people to operate. At least half of them there to keep the radiation and safety features contained but still the shear effort required was immense.
Short term the nuclear reactor might be better than the gravity reactor but they were thinking for the future.
The whole settlement actually made a party of it. Food was laid on tables and the two three hundred something people that weren’t helping cheered the main group on.
Slowly with a distant roar the reactor began to generate a heavy yellow liquid near the top. Toxic false matter began to fall the output dropping its payload a kilometer down from the sky. Yellow liquid turned to mist far before it reached the bottom. A mist that slowly built in the center of its shaft, compressed and pushed down by the mist above it.
Soon mist was solid and a trickle of rain fell to the plate below. Hidden deep in the shaft it was definitely impacting the plate and melting into nothing. Transformed into a transitionary power unaffected by gravity to bounce back towards the top.
The falling mass was syphoned and used to push the reactor further.
And as the three began to interface, lines of aether connected the whole. The whole inside of the reactor was a black box. A separate space they couldn’t see in. Even though Richard had climbed up the inside – even though he had directly placed a lot of the internals…they couldn’t say exactly what was happening anymore.
His stats probably made it more of a black box. Like how a dungeon pulled aether into an enclosed space and kept it there the stats were pulling aether until the environment in that tower was rich and...hard to measure.
Richard read diagnostics from his super computer still helpfully sending his AI updates. He watched as systems slowly came online. His newest super fast ai chip was shoved into its permanent position in another dimension. His syphons began running power to the bottom and top, slowly but surely ramping up towards the “break even” state the reactor was pushing for.
The ground shook slightly, vibrations running along the entire tower and a few people began to scream about how the whole thing was going to fall apart. Richard stared entranced.
Power was diverted to the more active containment devices – minuscule amounts of energy siphoned off the draw and pumped into strengthening the tower.
The vibrations faded.
His system was performing its minor task of keeping the reactor running smoothly. Siphons turned on and off as the computer ran diagnostics and enabled its optimal power sources.
An hour passed several amongst the 50 swapping out as they stared in silence at the reactor building and building.
Finally a bar on Richard's graph flicked from red to yellow and stayed there. The reactor was at steady state!
The system he set up began bootstrapping itself into a complexity hole – the initial program he wrote activated a line of dedicated chips and fuzzy algorithms with simple instructions to “improve the original program”. Script V2 was tested in a sandbox and then swapped with the main thread.
It wasn’t just a simple program being rewritten. The entire operating system, its internal communication protocols. Everything from the software to hardware was tweaked bit by bit with each new version.
V2’s flow structure was run through the neural network chips and baked into quantum relays stone shifting as the system printed prototypes into the walls of the reactor. V2 was sent off for improvement.
V2.2->2.78 happened in quick succession as the bulk of the processing happened in the sped up dimension. The reactor was now making enough energy to handle that. New version. Reboot. New version. Reboot. Most versions simple swaps of common algorithms or regression fixes. Nothing truly mind-blowing but strangely exciting due to how fast they were swapping.
V3 was suddenly merged and Richard lost access to the verbose log.
He was still getting a feed of the reactor but his connection to the computer had been removed following his own tenants.
For some reason, Richard thought he would have access for longer.
Richard forwarded an edited version of his AI graph to Muhamed who read it and nodded. “Let's push a bit closer to a positive feedback loop and hype up the point with a countdown”
Sure, he could deal with the crowd work. It's not like Richard wanted to stand up there and bask in the praise of the crowd. Nope.
Richard smiled to himself as he watch his personal graph climb. They were already at positive feedback – he was just siphoning so much for the computer it hadn’t broken even yet.
Bringing out a platform Muhamed stood on it and began making a speech. Partway through he paused “I’ve just been told we are close to break even, Give me a second to get the proper estimate…and now! Ten! Nine! Eight!...”
The crowd whooped higher and higher as the fake countdown grew and Richard watched his bar approach green.
The moment it ended, people started shutting down the nuclear reactor. A few particularly eager volunteers moved to the main reactor to start boosting it up.
Richard continued watching his graph. Bit by bit it continued to build – suddenly unnoticed by anyone else it ticked to green.
♾️ Achievement get: Main contributor to the creation of the planet's first gravity reactor (Unique)
Description: Many mark this milestone as the difference between a successful aether society and one doomed to fail. You’ve helped create a source of endless power. You in particular have the highest contributions to the project and could be seen as a key reason for its success.
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Stat: +27 Integrated AI power
Stat: +27 Mental speed
Stat: +27 Mental defense
Stat: +27 Free stats.
⭐ Achievement get: Creator of an acceptably biased minor system. (True Unique)
Description: Through a combination of ingenuity and madness you have, as an individual, created the seed of a weak self-growth [secondary system] rivaling the [secondary system] allocated to your world. Your system is currently ranked as a tertiary system with direct chain of command to the [primary system]. Secondary system has initiated handshake and gifted minor resource allocation rights. Secondary system has delegated minor responsibilities. Due to bias falling within acceptable limits, this creation will not be announced as a world notification no matter its potential.
Through many many worlds races and times this specific creation and the steps used to make it are wholly unique.
The number of secondary systems created unaided across the entire history of the universe is 24. The number created as an individual is 10. The number created without studying the initial secondary system is 2.
The number created alone and before studying the initial secondary system was previously 0.
This accomplishment warrants the title of True-Unique. Unique transcending unique.
As an achievement, this rarity gives three options.
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You may exchange this title for an equivalent absolute mantel. Your current world does not have systems in place to interact with said mantle. This may be the most powerful or weakest of rewards depending on how your system develops.
You may cash out your prize in stats – 243 free stats with no strings attached or 729 stats spread between achievement-relevant presets. You may use a limited “boon” request to ‘R’ to break either a single law, modify a single world system, create a single custom skill limited only by your innate aetheric affinity or similar variable personal request.
…
Richard stared at the two achievements.
Cash Money!
…
Yipeeee.
...
Fuck. That was a big reward. What was he even going to do?
Richard was still staring at the second achievement when people in the surroundings started receiving their own achievements. He found himself drifting away from the crowd walking further and further from the party heading towards his workshop and a place to think.
What should he do now?
Richard reached his workshop and drifted towards his chair. his comfortable comfortable chair.
Leaning back Richard stared up at the sky the system notification still resting in his vision.
No seriously. What do I do now?