Aron watched as the atomic printer in his lab whirred to life, printing the base materials he would require to build his runic computer. Block after block of pure minerals slid onto a waiting tray, beneath which he had already carved a mana condensing runic construct linked to a fusion reactor the size of a golden retriever.
“Nova, increase the time dilation around the condenser as high as it can go,” he ordered.
Nova nodded and waved her hand; the condenser construct was immediately increased to a time dilation factor of 1100:1. In reality, they could do the same thing by increasing the size and output of the runic construct and fusion reactor, but that wouldn’t fit in Aron’s personal lab, virtual or not.
“While that’s working, let’s see what the system has for programming languages that’re compatible with runic and biological computers,” he muttered to himself, bringing up his system shop window and giving Nova access to his senses with a blink.
“Hmm... you,” he began, “and... you.” He moved a runic programming language and a biological programming language into the system shop’s cart and clicked purchase.
Dozens of millions of SP were deducted from his remaining amount. And due to the size of the languages in question and his enhanced brain structure, he didn’t have to be put into a coma before downloading them. All he felt as the download completed was a brief stab of pain between his eyebrows, which rapidly faded and left nothing but the new knowledge behind.
It may have seemed like he had made random choices, but he had actually judged them rather thoroughly before making his decision. His personal implants, as the emperor of all humanity, were all on the absolute bleeding edge of the best technology the empire had, courtesy of Nova and his frequent stays in the extended-stay edition of the VR medical pods. So his current thinking speed and processing abilities were roughly a thousand times that of non-enhanced people, which was evident in the time dilation he could easily handle when necessary.
The two languages he had chosen weren’t necessarily the best, nor were they the most expensive, but they were carefully selected with flexibility and open-endedness in mind. It would make his upcoming job of fusing them with Prometheus++ much easier, as well as postpone the need for later updates until he was ready to purchase the tier 2 versions of all of his tech.
[The materials should be ready now, sir,] Nova announced, having kept track of the manaforging process while Aron was busy shopping and downloading new knowledges.
“Excellent!” He rubbed his hands together like a shady merchant in an underground bazaar. “Let’s get building, shall we?”
He picked up a cylindrical mana alloy made of vanadium, manganese, gold, platinum, silicon, and beryllium. It practically glowed to the naked eye and was nearly blinding in his mana sense. Placing it back into the atomic printer, he shaved slices off of it that were approximately three nanometers thick. Any thinner and he wouldn’t be able to carve runes on it, and if it was any thicker, it would cause transmission issues, throttling, and bottlenecks. Not to mention the size and form factor.
Once he had hundreds of identical wafers, he began swiping his fingertip back and forth across them, leaving trails of glowing golden runic script behind his steady movement. The material he was working with, which he had dubbed mana steel, was very brittle and fragile, though it was highly conductive when considering both mana and electricity, so he was being very careful as he carved the runic script into the wafers.
Twenty hours later, the carving was complete and line after line of brilliant golden runic symbols had been carved on the hundreds of wafers. In total, there were trillions of runic words that acted as switches, replacing the ones and zeros of humanity’s binary number system. And Aron had completed the carving process in less than a day; if the originators of the technology were to see that, they would be absolutely flabbergasted. It took hundreds of their runic scribes months to accomplish a task that a single human had just done virtually with a wave of his hand!
(Ed note: He has hundreds of millions, if not billions, of entire *lines* of runic code on his heart. Here, he’s only dealing with runic symbols, or words, in the trillions. So the total number he’s writing per minute is a lot higher than if he was writing lines of code in the trillions, hence his speed. Also consider that he regularly studies the runes on his runic heart, so he has experience deciphering microscopic runes and has learned to do so without a scribing pen, which the originators of the tech would probably have used.)
Aron stacked the wafers atop each other in a set order, then fused them together with a flood of mana. His first runic computer’s processor was complete.
He repeated the task for each of the remaining critical computer components, then assembled it and screwed it into a case that Nova had manifested for him. The case didn’t need to be hand-crafted; a simple steel box the size of a Playstation 5 would do just fine.
Now that the hardware was complete, he sat at his desk and manifested a keyboard that would work with the runic coding language he had selected and began coding an operating system for the newly assembled hardware. Five hours passed and his fingers were still dancing over the keys, practically leaving afterimages as he transferred the code from his head to his keyboard. The eight hour mark came and went and he was still singlemindedly focused on his task.
It wasn’t until twelve hours after he had started the coding process that he finally hit enter and his raw code was sent to a compiler.
“Finally!” he cheered, leaning back in his chair and throwing his arms straight up for a deeply satisfying stretch. “Now we just have to wait for it to compile and I can benchmark the new hardware.”
[Congratulations, sir,] Nova said.
“Thank you. Now it’s time to build the biological computer since I’ve got some time while the compiler runs on the runic OS. That one will be much easier than the runic computer. All I need to do is mix up a growth medium and seed it with blank nucleosomes, then wait for them to propagate and grow.”
Anticipating Aron’s request, Nova waved her hand and manifested a completed biological computer. Due to the relative ease of manufacture, neither of the two people in the lab found it necessary to go through the step by step process of growing the “hardware” itself.
Another twelve-hour coding marathon later, Aron flexed his fingers and shook his hands before picking up a sterile syringe containing a virus that had been engineered to deliver his new operating system to the nucleosomes floating in his biocomp vat, suspended in their nutrient solution. He inserted the syringe into a sterile port and the “programming” of the computer began.
