Spatial Arts
The spatial arts is one of the cornerstones of what makes galactic society possible. The use of teleportation from planet to planet, continent to continent, or city to city needs no explanation. Yet, how does one even begin to achieve this? For one, begin with the cultivation of the sense of space itself. While not necessary, this sense of space, in my experience, is the difference between a good spatial matist and a great one.
To begin diving into the intricacies on the creation and casting of a spell such as teleportation or anything related to this discipline for that matter, several prerequisite topics are required that are out scope for this book.
We can, however, discuss the effects of some popular spatial spells, take shrink for example…
Excerpt from "Introduction to the mana arts"
by Grand loremaster Manis
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The setup didn't take long since all he had to do was plug in a few cables. Also, there was a desk built into the wall in his room that provided more than enough space for all of his hardware.
Elijah however, wasn’t keen on connecting to this unknown alien signal with his expensive PC, so he opted to use his laptop which mainly had all of his university stuff. He of course moved all important files to his main PC in case something went wrong.
He quickly set up a new virtual machine on his laptop. Which didn’t take more than a few button presses.
A virtual machine was just as the name implies, a completely virtualized machine. Ideally, a virtual machine was completely separated from the rest of the laptop, meaning that whatever happened in the virtual machine stayed in the virtual machine.
But, from Elijah’s experience, nothing was absolute. Even if he lost the laptop, he wouldn’t feel bad. Although it was still expensive.
Elijah, now seated at his desk, began to connect to the unknown signal. He didn’t know what to expect nor did he put up any ‘defensive’ measures. Cybersecurity was never his forte.
“Connecting to the unknown signal, Edgar. Also, be on the lookout for anything leaving the laptop” Elijah said.
Edgar was his best bet to see if there was anything more to this signal. Although the laptop was as isolated as he could make it, he was still in the connectivity range of everything on his ship.
“Of course, sir.”
Once it was fully connected, Elijah waited to see if anything would happen. And after a couple of seconds… nothing happened.
“Anything?”
“None, sir”
Well, at least nothing was ‘leaking’ out. And after quickly checking the logs for the virtual machine, everything appeared to be normal.
All that was left was to check what this signal transmitted. Which Elijah had no idea how to do. And despite how much faster Edgar would investigate this, he wouldn’t feel safe until Edgar learned how to protect himself.
Elijah opened a web browser and idly wondered if he could reach the websites he frequented from here. Yet, instead of a familiar blank tab appearing, there was a message. One that was in perfect English.
Did this ‘Hub’ already know English? Or did it instantly translate what was on the virtual machine? Regardless, he was a new user so he clicked
As someone familiar with the concept of the Hypernet, Elijah quickly understood that this was something very similar. But he wasn’t sure if aliens unfamiliar with this would be able to understand with such a brief overview.
Elijah opted to search rather than click the given topics, he typed ‘Spoogle’ in the search bar.
That confirmed that this was completely separate from the Hypernet, possibly. He tried searching for other things yet ended up with the same result. He wasn’t sure if there were no results due to it not being a topic or if there was truly nothing.
Elijah clicked on ‘Communication(Recommended)’. The webpage changed and displayed multiple things which he assumed were news articles. But the ones that immediately caught his eye were things he was already working on.
<...>
The Translation was perfect from what he could tell. Testing and cross-referencing this translation with the one his software was making would be necessary. The same applies to the Gudrun spatial coordinates, the ones given were in terms that Elijah could understand but in a very different format.
Elijah copied down the given spatial coordinates with his DW-Pad. But he couldn’t do anything with the
He flicked the spatial coordinates he copied up and out of his DW-Pad screen, “Edgar, how long would it take for us to reach these coordinates using hyperspace.”
“I can not calculate this, sir,” Edgar quickly replied.
“…Right,” Elijah groaned.
They didn’t know where they were in the galaxy. Although it was possible to use the galaxy’s center as the origin point and go from there, the system that the Federation used would be off by several tens of degrees. Which was substantial.
Federation space navigation used other stars as reference points, with Earth at the center of it all. And with no recognizable stars, it was a problem.
Maybe there was a star map somewhere in this ‘Communication’ section. Elijah started searching, yet even after several minutes, he wasn’t able to find one. It gave coordinates but nothing on where and how to use them.
He might have to head back to Rotia and contact Turom if there was no star map in the book that she gave. There was something in it that looked similar to a star map but it could’ve also been a diagram to help the reader.
He had quite a bit of time on his hands so he could either keep investigating the hub or go back to trying to figure out the soulless. Neither was going anywhere, so Elijah decided to study the soulless first.
Standing up from his desk, he went to the other side of his room where his VR capsule was waiting, in the same position as when he first loaded it. It was held down by high-powered magnets so he didn’t have to do any extra securing when taking off, but it was a pain to move.
He opened it up and lay inside. Then through some advanced technology and processes that he didn’t fully understand, he was in his virtual workshop. The abrupt change in environment was jarring when he first got a VR capsule, but he got used to it after several weeks.
His virtual workspace was peaceful, yet eerily silent. He was in a vast plain of grass that extended towards the horizon with some trees dotted around. The sun was shining in the blue sky and a light breeze blew through the air. Yet there were no animals or insects in this space, just as Elijah liked it. Despite having expertise that typically restrains one indoors, he liked the outdoors minus the annoying insects.
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Under the shade of a copse of trees was his workshop. An odd squared area that contained multiple desks with various mechanical parts and several filled standing drawing boards. Not a hint of dirt was able to cross into this area, leaving the carpeted floor particularly clean and bright.
Elijah walked to his workshop. This was where he designed the two housekeeping bots that were currently cleaning his ship. And also where he extensively tested them against many house hazards plus ship hazards. They didn’t fare that well with the latter.
What he had in his workshop right now were his attempts at designing a ‘chef’ bot, with the Hypernet at his disposal and this virtual space he had made good progress on making dexterous arms.
But he would revisit all of this once he figured out the soulless, at least partially.
“Edgar, you there?”
“I am here, sir,” Edgar replied a second later.
“Good to know.”
He still wasn’t sure what he wanted Edgar to do, so he would let him do whatever for now. The reason why Elijah had to decide on what to ‘specialize’ Edgar in was due to how this particular AI was built.
Early inventions of AI were essentially programs that pieced together an answer using a very large dataset. While this type of AI became more advanced and refined over time, easily doing the work of thousands of humans, there was a minor problem. The AI wasn’t conscious.
And Edgar just so happened to be one of the tens of thousands of AI, who might achieve true consciousness or at least something similar. However, given that Edgar was part of the 3rd iteration, the most probable result was failure. Also, Edgar was dramatically less powerful than the advanced ones.
Torus University guaranteed that Edgar would be perfectly functional even if the experiment turned out to be a failure. But all they wanted was more data and possible outliers that have displayed some semblance of being conscious. And Elijah didn’t lose anything so he agreed.
“Could you bring in a copy of the soulless using the most recent 3D model?” Elijah asked. “Also, use materials that closely resemble what it's made of.”
A second later a little animation played out in an open area beside his workshop. Blue lines appeared and outlined the frame of the soulless. Then the internal machinery was made using the material that Edgar had chosen, followed by the outer casing.
The soulless was just as he remembered it, a very poor quality humanoid body with no head. Just as he was about to clear his workshop of his earlier work, the soulless abruptly fell and crumpled in on itself.
“Huh”
With a quick mental command, Elijah saved his workshop then cleared everything leaving a flat square surface. He then reformed the soulless in the middle of the workshop but made it have no physics, leaving it floating in the air.
The best thing about VR for Elijah was the fact that he could endlessly make designs and then immediately apply them without wasting materials. Like with this soulless body, he could simulate it as many times as needed without touching the real thing.
Although VR wasn’t a 100% recreation of reality it was so close that the difference was negligible. But the amount of computational power and energy that was required to achieve this was massive. Even his virtual space with trees, wind, and the sun was pretty heavy for his VR capsule to handle.
Elijah let gravity take hold of the soulless, causing it to crumple once again.
“Edgar, what did you use for the material?” Elijah asked.
“Iron, sir”
“For everything?”
“Yes. Iron has the closest resemblance to the metal that was used in the entire body.”
That was a very bad design decision. Who makes a robot out of pure iron? It probably wouldn’t even be able to move. Yet, the soulless that he witnessed were most definitely moving, even fighting with relative ease.
He reformed it again, levitating it in the air. Pinching the air and pulling away from the soulless, stripped it of its armor, then disassembled the armor to its base components. It was quite magical, how the VR capsule was able to sense his intentions. Then again, his mind was inside of it somewhere.
The armor floated at the side of the skeletal frame, partitioned into segmented parts to allow freedom of movement. It wasn’t hard for Elijah to figure out how the armor was put together, it was essentially plates of metal screwed on.
He then did the same with the frame, separating its relatively complex hands, feet, and joints. The soulless hands and feet had three fingers and toes aside from a typical human five.
Several seconds later the entire soulless was disassembled. Although some parts were damaged, he could probably deduce how they would affect the overall machine.
Elijah looked at the various parts and slowly put them back together starting with the hands. He didn’t care about how these alien parts were manufactured, he didn't even know where to start. He was more interested in what concepts and principles were applied to the parts of the soulless machines.
The soulless hand, for example, was arguably less complex than an android one due to fewer fingers. Yet, from what he could see it was about the same, if not more. The soulless seemed to be made for combat so he supposed dexterous fingers were needed to handle several weapons. Not that he would know.
Elijah was impressed as he quickly inspected the other parts of the frame; it seemed on par with what he had seen in some introductory classes in high school. He would have to study it more thoroughly to be sure though.
Despite its crude-looking exterior, the inner workings were quite delicate. He also identified what he believed were the power source and some sort of communication device.
As interesting as all of this was, he wasn’t able to determine the reason for how the soulless could move in reality yet not here.
He rubbed his chin, the feeling of his skin didn’t feel quite right to his fingers if he were to focus on it. A needed feature to distinguish reality from the virtual one.
Perhaps there was something not simulated correctly? He looked at the other components of the soulless that were floating in front of him. He held them and turned them, trying to find anything abnormal. It didn’t take long for him to find something weird.
On the inside of the soulless armor were engravings. Elijah didn’t recognize it as any sort of picture or language, it could also be the marking of the creator. The engravings seemed to encompass the entire inside of each piece. It probably connected perfectly when the armor was assembled.
A piece of artistry that was only on the inside, he found it quite strange. If it served any other purpose however he had no way of knowing, but it was the only thing that was out of place.
“Let’s see what makes this tick”
***
Elijah was eating breakfast cereal on the kitchen island in the living room. He had to unpack the ration boxes again since he had to secure them for take off. He’ll have to put the boxes back when they prepare to land as well.
It had been about sixteen hours since he exited his VR capsule. The soulless itself wasn’t hard to understand, he had seen enough robots to intuitively know how well the soulless could move. There was also the internal logic of the soulless but he didn’t have the tools, interest, or need to decipher it.
“I’m done,” Elijah pushed his bowl away from him.
Two circles the size of his head floated to his bowl. Then a metal arm folded out of both and grabbed his bowl in sync. These were the housekeeping bots that Elijah himself made. They featured a hover module, some sensory modules, and the best arms that he could make.
Essentially just a floating arm.
And because of that the bots couldn’t function independently, Edgar was currently controlling them but he would change that when he could.
Not that he couldn't buy an android like he did Evelynn, but he found the idea of making it himself more interesting. Plus, it exempted him from buying another ridiculously expensive android.
He stood up from his seat and walked to the center of the room where the couches were. There wasn’t anything that required his immediate attention, so he wanted to just laze around for a bit.
Elijah lay down on the couch and stared at the ceiling. It was white, flat, and uninspired. He had to decorate the ship when he could, it felt weird seeing so many empty spaces. Although he wasn’t much of a decorative person, he still spruced up his dorm room a bit. But that was a much smaller space compared to a starship.
There wasn’t much entertainment on the ship, all his interests required either a connection to the hypernet or some equipment, neither of which he had. Well, there was the fabricator that he hadn’t played with yet, but he refrained from doing anything in case he needed it.
All he would use the fabricator for really was the chef bot, which he hadn’t completely designed.
He sighed. He could’ve been home by now, spending time with his brother. He was away from home most of the time either studying, working, or with his friends. Leaving his brother on his own. Jax still went to school of course. He even had friends, well one friend, he was pretty cool.
Yet he couldn't shake the feeling that he failed somehow as an older brother. And he planned to take his time finding a job to spend some time with Jax, maybe even impart some life lessons too.
While this might delay Jax’s treatment, it shouldn't delay too much. He also had no idea why his parents didn't pay for it, they even got him a starship which was much more expensive than the treatment.
Maybe they wanted to wait for Jax to graduate? But what was the point? Better to do it as early as possible.
Elijah had a hard time deciphering his parents’ thought processes, considering he and his brother were in an orphanage for the majority of their lives, it made sense.
He closed his eyes and cleared his thoughts. Resting his mind and body. The status screen appearing in his mind’s eye didn’t help at all.
He skimmed over it and then dismissed it when he found that there were no changes. This was the main problem he didn’t know how to address. The medical capsule already scanned him, finding no foreign objects at all while his brain activity was completely healthy.
Then if he wasn’t hallucinating, the capsule would’ve picked up on it, and if he wasn’t being directly manipulated. Then just what was this?
A law of nature like what Turom said? Most definitely not.
Well, it didn’t matter much to Elijah, it wasn’t harmful so far but he would keep it in mind in case it ever did.
He yawned, the sound of running water as the bots washed his plates filled the silence of the ship. Too bad he didn't download any music on any of his devices. Since once the bots were finished there would only be silence.
He felt slightly bored now, he got up from the couch to get the laptop from his room. After a minute or so, he was back on the couch, sitting this time.
The laptop was still connected to The Hub except the web browser seemed to have crashed when he left it. It was empty, not showing the
He typed into the search bar.
>> ’English-Adontian Translation’
Elijah tried several more variations and other things only for it to return ‘No results’ every time. It was then he realized that he didn't have a search engine. The Hub may have one but had no idea what it would be called.
A wealth of information and he couldn’t query it.
He closed his laptop with a sigh and laid back down.
Now he really didn’t have anything to do.