System Programmer

Joshua wasn't sure what was going on. Logically, the water particle had to turn into lightning. But instead, he ended with a particle that possessed characteristics of both states. This was without precedent, he had never heard of energy particles containing both energy types at once.

…

Wait, actually he might have. He had developed a combination attack with Catherine to combine her water with his lightning. He ran over to the devices he had installed for that and grabbed a sample of electrified water. However, the result was different. The water he was currently holding quickly lost its electric component. The lightning & water particle were mashed together but couldn't remain this state very long. On the other hand, in his latest experiment, the two states were present at once in a single particle.

Had he made a mistake somewhere in his rune? He was fairly sure he had followed the same pattern as for when he turned a particle into the neutral state. Still, he opened his rune designer and checked every part. Everything was normal… Therefore, his initial hypothesis must have been wrong. This part didn't turn the water into the lightning state, instead, it added it to the existing state. But then, why didn't that happen with his previous tests using the neutral state?

He had to perform more tests, however, as he was about to dive fully into the issue; Luna gave him a small shock, indicating he was acting irrationally again.

'Oh right, I gotta fix my world first!'

Joshua cursed inward, he was getting too excited again. He rushed over to the next ice block and quickly turned it into lightning to fix the crack. A while later, ever fissure had been repaired. Now that this cumbersome matter was out of the way, he could go back and play a bit.

Unfortunately, neither he nor Luna had any idea of where to start. Oh well, he would figure it out eventually. Finding out how energy particles worked was useful, but even more important was using that his newly founded knowledge to his advantage.

The result of his experiment stormed through his mind as different possibilities took form in his brain. Suddenly, his head began to shine like a lightbulb as he had an idea. Then, his head exploded. A loud bang resonated in his world and black smoke was coming out of his neck. The smoke slowly reformed Joshua's head and he began to laugh like the madman that he was. He knew exactly what he had to do.

He had to create a new type of transistor.

Transistors are the key component in nearly all modern electronic devices. Its invention was one of the key factors that allowed the computer revolution to start in the 20th century. They were used to make the most basic unit of data in computer storage: a bit. A bit consists of two states: off and on, usually represented by a zero and a one. Usually, bits are represented in groups of 8 to form a byte. A byte is what's mostly used to encode a single character of text. Take 1024 bytes and you get a kilobyte, 1024 kilobytes form a megabyte and so on… In other words, computer systems consisted of billions of transistors.

Quantum computers differed from classic computers because they didn't use bits to store their data. Instead, they use a different sort of transistor that allows producing qubits or quantum bits. How they work is relatively complex but the basic idea is that a qubit contains 2 superposed bits thanks to quantum mechanics. Therefore, while a bit value could only consist of '0' & '1', a qubit could have a value of: '00', '01', '10, '11'. Now, add a second bit or qubit and try out every combination possible. With 2 bits, you have 4 possible outcomes for data, with 2 qubits… you have 16. Fast-forward this to the fact that computers consist of billions of bits and you can directly see why qubits are much more powerful than regular bits.

Now, imagine instead of using a bit or a qubit, you build a system that used an energy particle as the base. A particle could consist of every combination of the 7 elemental states + the neutral state in case none of them were present. In other words, 7 superposed bits. 128 possible states from a basic unit… The kind of computing power he could obtain from this would be… unbelievable.

The whole prospect made Joshua so excited he spent about half an hour running around dancing, jumping and singing around before he calmed down a bit. He wasn't wasting time, however, as while he was dancing, he thought about the best way to create the 'rune-transistor'.

He began designing the prototype for the rune. For starters, he defined a seven-bit based unit to use as a base which he called a runic bit or 'rubit'. He represented it inside Luna as an array with seven elements: [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0] . Each number referred to one of the 7 elemental states, the possible value being '0' & '1'. In case everything was 0, the rubit would be in a neutral state, while a 1 would indicate an element being present in the rubit. Next, he started to work on the transistor itself. The design he came up with was a bit unusual: he placed the energy particle at the center with 8 lines connected to it. Each line started and ended in the particle, making it look like some sort of spider. Each was also provided with an energy state activator, one for each element and the neutral one. The principle was simple: every time a 0 had to be turned into a 1, the corresponding element would activate and the particle would traverse the converter before returning to its starting position. Upon activating the neutral state, the particle would traverse it and reset while all the currently turned on element nodes would deactivate. So far, so good. The only tricky part was subtracting an element from the current particle. Joshua had no way to do that in a single move but he found a workaround. When an element had to be deactivated for a 1 to turn into a 0, the corresponding elemental line would turn off. Then the particle would traverse the neutral state to reset, before looping through every element still active to get to the desired state.

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For example, imagine a particle is currently in the lightning-fire-water state. The water state had to be removed. The line adding the water state will be turned off in the transistor. Then, the particle will traverse the neutral state converter to turn the particle back to neutral while the fire & lightning line remain active. Next, the particle will go through the lightning & fire line again to become a lightning-fire particle.

This annoyed Joshua as he would rather just deactivate the element without doing a full reset, but he didn't have a better alternative for now. It didn't matter much in the end since the operation was so fast it would only improve the performance by a few picoseconds. He could always improve the model later if he found a better way.

He had the basic ideas done so he spent a few hours perfecting the model and running some tests. After several hours, he finally had a decent product to use as a base. He activated the transistor with a test program he wrote, which consisted of constantly alternating the 0 & 1 in the array and trying out every possible combination of change. He was glad to see it worked. He enthusiastically made a second one and connected them. Since this was a 7-bit based system, the number of possible results of combining to rubits was 128², 16384. This was phenomenal.

Joshua couldn't help but smirk seeing this. His goal was clear now: to remodel his soul world using the rune-transistor as a base. It would boost his power tremendously. However, before starting the process, he had to verify one last thing. He asked Luna to calculate an estimate of the amount of energy this operation would require. Upon hearing the result, his expression grew grim but only momentarily.

'As expected, this is such a major improvement that building an entire world like this would require much more energy than I currently possess,' he thought.

He considered the matter for a moment before nodding inwardly. Since he didn't want to evolve without first converting his whole world, he couldn't raise his maximum amount of energy for the moment. If he were to just activate the process right now, he would soon run out of ambient energy, and it could even be harmful to others. For example, should he perform the upgrade in the forest, he would first absorb the energy present in the air before starting to absorb resources coming from the local flora and fauna. Therefore, he had to find a massive source of energy he could use to safely absorb. Such a source was of course not easy to find but consider his current position. He was currently in the middle of the ruins of an ancient lab belonging to a lost civilization. Catherine had been reading a lot lately and while he hadn't paid attention to her findings since he was busy, Luna had recorded everything. He took out an old map Catherine had recorded and examined it. A smile appeared on his face.