I came to and immediately called up my status.

Name:

_______ Alana Skyisle

Age:

33 days

Species & Subtype:

Female human embryo

Level:

1

Experience:

7/200

Health:

1/1

Stamina:

1/1

Mana:

1/1

Mana regen:

1 m/hr

Strength:

0

Agility:

0

Dexterity:

0

Vitality:

0

Charisma:

0

Magic:

1

Luck:

0

Intelligence:

5 [+89]

Wisdom:

0

Soul:

1

Skills:

[Transient Soul LV 1]

[Universal Comprehension LV 1]

[Identify LV 0]

I guessed that having oneself drained of mana wasn’t healthy, since I lost 3 days to unconsciousness. Did the Soul need mana to function? Hmm.

I briefly wondered what was happening to any excess mana that my body was generating. Was it simply not stored? How was I even gathering or generating mana? Did I sponge it off from the environment? What was responsible for storing it? What was responsible for gathering or generating it?

One mana per hour regeneration was painfully slow. I identified myself again and confirmed this to be an hour from my homeland as I counted out seconds using the "tick-tick-one, tick-tick-two" method and was only slightly off from 20 minutes.

To pass the time I decided to study Universal.

As I pulled [Universal Comprehension] tab away from my skills I noticed that my name was now:

The base letters were the same, but a variety of squiggly bits around it had changed from:

This wasn’t how normal language worked - names didn't just shift around... and what was that weird static around... or behind the letters?

When I put [Universal Comprehension] back in, it showed up as [LV 0] instead of [LV 1].

I see! Dropping a skill and re-adding it had brought it down to zero.

I started to switch the skill on and off, memorizing how the second layer of symbols above and beneath the letters changed. There was only one conclusion - the Universal language was far more complex than I expected it to be.

I pulled out the translator skill and pointed [Identify] at one of the symbols. It immediately expanded into an entire array of further symbols. I inserted [Universal Comprehension] back into place and the array vanished.

Now the [Universal Comprehension] skill seemed like a limitation - having it on prevented me from seeing layers upon layers of extra content within the language of the System. In a way, it made sense for it to be this way. For example, in my world most computer users had no idea how computers actually worked or how to write software. Most people were lazy and simply enjoyed the end result. Even back when I was a kid, I just had to know how something worked - taking things apart was my passion to the irritation of my parents. My family doctor called it 'the engineer's knack' as a joke - a trait that made me hyper focused, antisocial and stubborn.

As my mana slowly regenerated, I recalled studying protein chains at University and learning the Algol programming language that me and my assistant used at the Computational Research Institute on our BESM-6 supercomputer. I had many fond memories with BESM-6, calling her my Bessie. She could store thirty two thousand words in her maximum addressable memory space and the virtual memory expanded her vocabulary up to 128K words or 768K bytes.

Her punch cards were so much fun to work with! Way back in 1960's, inspired by the ideas of Professor Sergey Lebedev about an explosion in computing, I dreamt of a future in which every proletariat worker in every factory could have their own personal computer with punch cards. Alas, the Soviet leaders didn’t believe in granting everyone personal computers, instead focusing on making enough nukes to vaporize every city on the planet. I really didn’t understand General Secretary Krushchev’s obsession with nuking America three times over. Even if we somehow disabled all of their nukes and turned all of USA into rubble and dust the follow-up nuclear winter would end the USSR just as well as being atomized.

Getting back to the present - the information chains within Universal Comprehension meant something, contained some sort of information, but I had no idea what any of it stood for.

Identify itself looked like in Universal. I identified the > floating bit and it expanded itself into:

≯̺̬͉̀̈́͗́

Next, I attempted to identify the ○ bit.

It expanded into:

`̸̧̛̩̦͓́̚͝͝○

Bit by bit I memorized a new, expanded version of [Identify]:

The more symbols I identified, the longer the information chain became, seemingly stretching out into depths of itself with increasing, looping detail.

I couldn't believe it! The true language of the System was akin to a matryoshka! It contained a variety of symbols within symbols. But, why was it so complex? There was a definite mystery here waiting to be solved!

Thankfully, I had the skills to do it. The scientific method, aka science of examining patterns is a methodology that can be used to determine the nature of reality - any reality, be it life around you or conceptual reality such as one in a computer simulation. Any system, be it one created via evolution or human hands can be broken down with math, understood and taken advantage of. No matter how seemingly visually complex something is - it all relied on repeating information to function.

In 1918, two French mathematicians, Pierre Fatou and Gaston Julia, though working independently, arrived simultaneously at the same conclusion - the language of the universe was iterative, recursive math. In 1975, IBM scientist Benoit Mandelbrot built atop their work and brought together hundreds of years of mathematical development, proving that incredible visual complexity arose from basic formulae. He called this discovery “the fractal”.

Using a computer simulation Dr. Mandelbrot showed humanity that fractals exist in everything. For example - how is the gargantuan supercell storm atop planet Saturn similar to a t4 virus? Both of them have a naturally arising fractal structure - the hexagon. The difference in size between the biggest hexagon in the Solar System and the smallest is absolutely mindboggling. The hexagon on Saturn is 30'000 km in size and the hexagon on the bacteriophage virus is just 20 nanometers!

In fact, all branching patterns in nature such as the neural circuits inside the human brain, trees, river deltas and mountains seen from space are fractal.

Thanks to my increased intelligence I could focus on the System language quite well, noting patterns within it. There was beauty to Universal, deep complexity beyond human language akin to mathematical formulae. Each notch of it was able to expand outward, flowing like a four-dimensional puzzle in my mind. I dove deeper into it using [Identify], trying to understand it and memorize every bit.

Eventually, after memorizing a hundred different iterations of Identify, I used my knowledge of mathematical formulae to combine all of them into a dandelion-like information superstructure. Since I worked with viruses my entire life, I imagined it looking akin to a RNA virus from the Coronaviridae family, with its numerous envelope proteins extending outwards from a central core, where each data-strand of [Identify] was a different protein envelope.

Hours and then days flew by as I slowly memorized and assembled the full version of [Identify] with all of its long, complex variety of info-strands.

The more I identified [Identify], the greater understanding I had of it. It wasn’t an understanding akin to a mere description, it was mathematical knowledge of Identify as an information pattern. I had discovered something incredible - the greater my awareness of this pattern was, the cheaper Identify became in terms of mana use.

At [5] [+89] intelligence I was able to memorize nearly a hundred different iteration patterns within the Identify spell. It had greatly decreased mana use! Thanks to my machinations, it now cost me 0.017 Mana to identify myself. Unfortunately, it didn’t give me extra information, but it was a lot cheaper to use, which was progress. I liked progress!