Today, I encountered a mailbox outside of our house as mom was the one who fetched the mail. As she carried a letter to the house, I giddily identified the information comprising its contents - it would be my first step to learning the written language of my new home. The only problem was that I was simply starting to lose track of things.

The biggest issue was that the Infoscope gave me far too much information to process. I refused to simplify my spell - back when I was just a university student learning about computers in 1952 under Professor Sergey Lebedev I worked with advanced machines like the BESM series. Over the years Dr. Lebedev showed our team how technology evolved and computers became smaller and more powerful with each iteration.

When it came to data gathering and sorting - I believed that the more complex and innovative a tool was, the better results it produced.

Computers in my world grew by leaps and bounds because having computers allowed humanity to make better computers. Moore's law, aka the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubled about every two years, was an incredible, self-fulfilling prophecy. In the same manner a more complex Identify allowed me to design the Infoscope and having the Infoscope would allow me to make something else even better. Productivity begat productivity and with magic there were no waste products, no planned obsolescence and limitless possibilities.

What I needed now was a better way to store, sort and access information gathered by the Infoscope - some sort of a library-like mental space that would allow me to review memories with greater ease. Surely, such a thing was possible to create with the intelligence of 106 [+89]!

I conceptualized a virtual space within my mind, one that contained all of my memories.

I imagined myself sitting in my BESM-6 supercomputer lab at the Soviet Computational Research Institute in Moscow. My imaginary supercomputer Bessie was to contain all of my memories up to this point. She was to be my imaginary interface which would sort memories by type. A secretary virtual assistant would be manning her, allowing me to ask specific questions to myself.

[Tu du!]

The System resounded.

[New Intelligence-based skill unlocked: [Mindspace] Slot it to activate!]

Yes! That’s it. I eagerly shoved [Mindspace] into the empty slot. At level zero, the Mindspace was looking like an empty office and it kept falling apart as soon as I ran out of mana. It was very expensive to visualize, eating up one mana every 3 minutes.

For three weeks I edited the Mindspace spell, entwining fractals such as [Stability], [Clarity], [Recollection], [Library], [Computer], [Order], [Avatar] and [Mental Assistant] into the spell, until I was able to raise it to [Mindspace LV 21] in the universal translator-simplified evaluation of it.

When I activated the improved spell, the darkness of the womb fell away and I found myself sitting inside my old lab in the Computational Institute. I stared at my avatar with the Infoscope. I looked like I was 37, which was exactly how I remembered myself when I worked here.

There was only one fundamental difference between how I looked back then and now. As I observed my avatar in 3rd person, I noted that my green eyes looked far older, wearing the weary expression of mistrust. My eyes had seen the collapse of the USSR, been haunted by death, economic devastation and the destruction of science and industry. I was no longer a carefree, young academic who believed in the power of the Soviet Union to change the world for the better.

My imaginary avatar was wearing my old lab coat, with a star pin and Gagarin’s portrait on it. I stood up and stretched, walking around the lab. It was nice to have hands and feet once again, even if they were basic mental constructs woven from my imagination and reinforced with the magic of the Mindspace. Bessie stood in front of me - a large, C-shaped supercomputer composed of four shelves and four control tables, the drives within her hopefully containing all of my memories. She blinked at me with myriads of red lights.

My imaginary secretary Alisa Selezneva sat in front of Bessie. She wore a white lab coat similar to mine with a pin. Her pin depicted Vostok 1 cutting across the USSR flag. Back in the day these simple enamel pins were the craze and we wore ours with pride as a celebration of what we believed was the beginning of the Soviet space age.

“Derive the root of 982121?” I asked my virtual assistant.

“991.020181429,” she answered with a monotone voice. She was still mostly imaginary and empty of emotions and life. The actual computations were made by the Infoscope, the avatar simply gave the answer with a familiar voice - that of an actress from an old Soviet movie. I needed to get more investiture points and put them into intelligence and memorize more Omnicode fractals to make her into an actual virtual human and not a basic calculator.

“Show me my vacation in the Ural mountains, spring of 1959?”

My secretary nodded and pressed a knob on Bessie. A section of BESM-6 lit up with flashing lights. A perfectly square window opened up in the middle of the lab. It had the view of the Urals as I had remembered them once.

A group of nine people were walking on skis across the snow-covered landscape. Snowdrop flowers bloomed beneath the glacier peaks upon fields that our Soviet camping group was traversing. Seeing my memory replaying right in front of me brought a tear to my eye.

It was just like I remembered it, even if some of the view was a bit smudged. When I focused on the smudged areas, they looked like an abstract oil painting. I guessed that this was Mindspace's way of filling up information which I had long forgotten or hadn’t paid attention to.

If I kept improving the Mindspace, I hoped to actually be able to walk through my memories. Alas, Level 7 was very far away and required greater identification of more things outside.

Using one of Bessie’s screens I was finally able to examine the contents of the letter and started to learn the local written language - it was fairly basic as far as things went and reminded me of Proto-Kartvelian language with its long, flowing script that lacked capitals. When I put the [Universal Comprehension] skill into my menu, it instantly translated the words for me.

I had learned that the letter was written by my grandmother Jundaria Hellenia Agamemnon. From the letter I learned that grandmother Hellenia and her husband lived in a large building complex in the capital city of Agamemnon in the Vaddi river delta somewhere far south of our valley. The Helleni family were my grandparents from my father’s side. This meant that my father had taken the Alan family name from my mom.

I briefly pondered whether this was a mere sign of his respect for her or a local cultural quirk that was different from my world. The village didn’t look particularly matriarchal, if anything everyone was relatively equal thanks to magic.

Most of the letter was filled with chatter about my grandmother's health issues, her rooftop garden, price of beans this summer, gangs fighting in the streets again and various bits of daily life in the big city of Agamemnon. From the tone of the letter, I was able to gather that Jundaria didn’t approve much of Skyisle, since everyone and everything here was limited to level 20. She also wrote that she would not come see her grandchild, because the trip was far too expensive and dangerous.

As for what was going on with my grandparents from my mother’s side of the family, I had no idea - they didn’t seem to be living in Skyisle and the letter didn’t mention them at all. The last line of the letter confirmed it. Grandmother Jundaria didn't like my mom.

[I really wish you didn't elope with Cassandra, didn't make an Unbreakable Vow to Goddess Ishira to stay by her side, wherever she is.

We miss you. Hugs and kisses,

~Jundaria Hellenia Agamemnon]

I contemplated the line. An unbreakable Vow? To a Goddess? Was this some kind of common wedding declaration people in love did? If it was literally Unbreakable did it mean that magic itself or the System somehow reinforced dad's love for mom? Was there a price that was paid to make such a Vow truly unbreakable? Were there rewards to be acquired? Could it be weaponized? Hrrmm.

I put it on my list of things to investigate in the future. My list of things to do was getting quite long.

The fact that people were able to go above level 20 outside of Skyisle gave me hope for the future. The issue seemed to be geographic and localized to an area. I wondered if there was something near Skyisle that was screwing up the System.

Throughout the passing days, I worked on making my virtual assistant more alive. It was nice to finally talk to someone even if she was just a virtual avatar, an idea of a person woven together from my memories. I linked all of my memories stored on Bessie to her, so that her responses would seem more human.

Her base design involved the recognition of key words or phrases in the input from me, and the output of the corresponding pre-programmed responses. I was trying to figure out how to make her smarter - it was slow going but I knew that it would help me deal with solitude when she was ready. What I really needed to figure out was how to give her true intelligence, not just an approximate simulation of one.

I kept the Infoscope halfway out of my mom’s belly to observe more things outside to gain more XP, while using the rest of its tendrils to identify and improve my [Mindspace].

I didn’t even pay much attention to what I was identifying out there. Improving Mindspace and creating a virtual helper was more important to me - science couldn't be done alone.