The Primus Magus

　　He kept thinking about his last unfinished contract. He went over the code in his head. He had gone over it so many times at this point that he could probably recite it in his sleep. He had to. Because this was the biggest contract he had been able to catch after more than four years of being a professional programmer.

　　It was a contract to make a marginally but significantly better encryption system than the one that was widely used presently. He had managed to do it by integrating the eighth gen quantum-computing core better than the industry standard integrated it. He did this by creating a creative new method of processing unique encryption keys using quantum parallelism.

　　While it may seem very unlikely for someone with barely five years of experience in the field, or someone who is only twenty three years old, to be able to make a program of such a caliber, he had three things going for him.

　　Firstly, due to evolution and advances in the medical field, humans in general had gotten progressively smarter. While the increase was not by a large degree, it was not an insignificant amount either.

　　Secondly, he also had always been somewhat smarter than average. Also not by a large margin, but by enough to be significant.

　　Lastly, he had always been almost inhumanly hard working. Having finished university just a few months before his nineteenth birthday, more than four years before the norm, all the while working on the side to be able to feed himself and pay his bills.

　　He also had an excellent talent in the field. He had always found that merging different smaller ideas or concepts into a larger functioning whole by thinking creatively while still keeping things constrained within a logical framework had always been his forte.

　　This was also the reason why once, when he had been reading a detective fiction in a group due to a group assignment in school, he had not understood why the others in the group had not figured out very early on who the culprit was, and were instead surprised when it was finally revealed in the story.

　　Therefore, since programming was the skill he was best at in his life, and since it was the only thing he knew to think about, he kept thinking about the program he had made for his last contract.

　　He kept trying to find flaws in his code, or think of ways to improve the code, or make it more efficient by reducing the amount of code required without harming the performance of his program. He could do this in his head because he had completely memorized that code by heart.

　　Due to all the thinking, he eventually slowly started to get tired. While the fatigue problem had lessened, it seemed that it was still very much there.

　　For the next couple of times that he woke up, he found himself constantly thinking about the program he had made.

　　However, after a few times, he stopped himself. Because he realized that he had spiraled back into his old routine, even though he now had an excellent opportunity to relax, something he had never had before, and did not know if he would ever have again.

　　Therefore, he decided that he would not only think about that one program that he had been working on just before he had found himself in this situation, but try and think about other productive things as well.

　　He started thinking about all that he could remember from the other programs he had written in the past. He also went over all that he knew about programming in general, and tried to think up and create new programs or new ways of using different coding languages in his mind.

　　When he started feeling the exhaustion creeping up a bit too fast, he decided to switch to meditating. He had found out that meditating seemed to stave off the exhaustion somewhat.

　　Suddenly it dawned on him that he had never tried to come back out of meditation. Before, whenever he had meditated because the exhaustion was becoming a little bit too strong to bear, he had always simply gradually faded to sleep. Therefore, he decided that this time he would try to come back out of meditation after a while and try to go back to thinking.

　　As such, after he plunged himself back into meditation and let the layers of consciousness slowly peel away, after a decently long period of time had passed, he slowly let his awareness come back to him very gradually, as though the tide was rising slowly at the sea shore that was his mind, raising his awareness along with it.

　　During a state of half-awareness, he felt as though there was a stream of warm current flowing into him from all sides of his body. He instantly recalled that there was another time, just after this situation had happened to him, that he had felt this exact same sensation.

　　This time he did not make the same mistake as the last time.

　　He immediately refocused on his meditation, not giving any attention to that sensation or thinking about it at all. After a while of focusing on keeping himself in this state of half-consciousness, he slowly started to try to feel that sensation again.

　　He found that the sensation was still there.

　　This time, since he was amply prepared, he managed to keep himself from falling out of this state of half-consciousness and yet still kept himself aware of the unique sensation.

　　It was a very comforting feeling, and he thought that it might have been this warm flow of something that caused his exhaustion to stay at bay.

　　As he inevitably gradually became more and more conscious, and his awareness slowly returned to him, he felt as though that warm flow also gradually faded and was slowly replaced by a mounting exhaustion that became more and more unbearable.

　　Until he eventually lost to it and fell asleep due to fatigue.