Dusk, one day after Timoteo and Dimitri set up camp, roughly three and half miles to the north-east, James’s Dungeon.

I was pretty darn happy with my overall progress. I had just opened up my dungeon for visitors, not that I had any idea when or if that might happen. However, I figured that I had built enough for my dungeon to provide some small level of non-violent intellectual challenge. My two puzzles, were light controlled electromagnetic door locks, the puzzles themselves were contained behind a centimeter of optically clear diamond, with LED lights, some mirrors with neodymium magnet based rotation, and on the second puzzle a prism, and a beam splitter. I had set things up so that in the first puzzle room, the object was to send the light through the prism, and only put the green part of the spectrum on the photovoltaic sensor. The second room’s puzzle I set up so that there were two sensors, one color of light needed for each, one green like the first room, the other red. Unlike the first room, solving the second rooms puzzle didn’t take you on to another room, it merely opened the reward alcove, and reopened the doors leading back to the entrance.

The reward I had setup for solving my pair of rooms, was a full scientific calculator, similar to the TI-30Xa Solar I had used back in school, although I had designed it myself from the ground up, and managed to fix the logarithm bug that plagued it. The case, I had made completely out of graphene, the screen and the solar cell I had behind a layer of diamond. I could hardly wait to see what the people of this world thought of it, it had the most complex processor I had been able to design thus far, I would be leveraging my own copy of that calculator, which I had in my little core room, next to the analog switchboard that I was using to control my defenses, and to reset my puzzle rooms. I had some fairly complex plans that required me to take my processor designs to the next level, unfortunately, that was probably going to take a fair bit of time and testing, as I didn’t have anything more complex than my calculator design stuck in my head.

The general idea for the next round of upgrades was to design and build a RISC type general computer processor, and then see about designing and testing an input interface more efficient for my new dungeon core existence, than the qwerty keyboard I had been using since elementary school. Flipping switches, and pushing buttons, although possible in my new life as a dungeon core, certainly wasn’t quick and easy. If I could get that processor up and running I could then bring digital audio and video to my dungeon, security cameras would allow my to more effectively monitor my dungeon and its surroundings, not to mention, I could then build reconnaissance drones to get a better understanding of the land I currently occupy. It was going to be a long journey, but once all said and done it should allow me much more control of my environment, and to see and speak with whoever comes to my dungeon, without them coming anywhere near my core.

Despite not having a central computer yet, I placed a few LED displays, with attendant cameras and microphones, around my dungeon, one near the entrance, on the outer cliff-face, another just inside the bunk room I had outfitted for up to twenty guests, the last one I built into the rear wall of the reward alcove. When I got around to building that computer, I would see about hooking those displays up. As night was falling, I didn’t expect any visitors anytime in my immediate future, frankly considering I was on mountainside above what appeared to be pristine forest, I really wasn’t expecting any visitors for quite a while. Despite all the effort I had put into getting a minimally viable dungeon in place, I really only had it there, in case a member of the local population stumbled upon my location.

After an hour procrastinating, I decided the next step was for me to design and build a core interface device, even the earliest of modern computers had some form of human interface device, and as I was no longer human, sigh, core interface device. The first thing I decided to test was whether or not my core induced current flow with my thoughts. The multi-meter I threw together for this project was able to confirm that, yes indeed, my thoughts induced current flow in the silver wire I was using for testing, when placed against my core. The problem that type of solution brought was that it would interfere with my crystal growth, meaning that could not be the long term solution to my computer interface problem. At least, if it was pressed up against my sides, I realized after double checking my overall dimensions, that despite the fact I was still resting on the ground, I was still growing evenly. Thus if I were to build a stand with the leads in it pressing up against the underside of my core, it should work, and not prevent me from growing evenly. By 9:30pm, according to my now calibrated clock’s LED display, I had raised myself up on a small pedestal that had 200 diamond insulated silver wires coming out of it.

The new problem I had with this setup was signal interpretation, it wasn’t like I could just adjust the output of my core to indicate the letters on a keyboard per wire, or anything of the like. As such, I decided to crudely map the output of my core via the wires to a RGB LED display, no real display driver except the voltage of the wire each pixel was hooked up to, signal amplitude mapped to the color selection. So as to better understand what each wire was doing, I laid out the pixels in the exact fashion the wires in the pedestal touched my core. This gave me an odd looking concave circular display, but once I turned the power on to the arrangement, it burst into a riot of colors, the reds, blues and greens flowing in thousands of shades and intensity’s. Watching this display quickly became rather calming, I had built myself a crude autonomic feedback device, and in many respects it was quite fascinating to see how the display responded to my thoughts. After seven minutes of literally self-reflection, and trying to manipulate the metaphorical third hand, I decided that my current setup didn’t have enough resolution to be truly meaningful, and shut it down so I could see about putting together a much higher resolution setup.

By the time midnight had rolled around, I had shrunken the wires down to fifty micron’s, about ⅔’s the width of a human hair, as my pedestal was 2 inches in diameter, that meant I would have had a total of 258,000 pixels in my display, except that I wanted to try something out and used half of the wires in my pedestal, as input instead of output. I still thought that my concave autonomic feedback display was quite impressive with 129,000 pixels, as opposed to my previously paltry 200. Powering the display, it quickly became obvious, that any attempt to control the output on such a fine grained level on my part was going to be an exercise in frustration, the display worked perfectly, and it was obvious that the way I had it set up, allowed the display to visually distinguish on a pixel by pixel basis the field I put out whilst resting on my small stand. As a control mechanism, for the moment, this method was beyond my reach, simply because I couldn’t consciously control what I wanted to do on a per pixel level of output. I did, however, manage to determine the appropriate range of voltage and amperage that I put out into the display, as such, I was going to test an input along one of the wires with the same voltage and amperage range. I decided that my first test was going to be a simple analog sound input from a microphone that I had in the LED panel at the front of my cave, appropriately stepped down to the correct voltage and amperage. I hoped that I would be able to interpret the signals coming from the microphone as sound, it would be most annoying if I could not do so, as I would be more limited in what inputs I could take in directly, and instead of directly being hooked to the system, I would have to instead hook the microphones to the equivalent of a surround sound system, which I would have to build once I had determined if my test had failed.

I ran a line of multi-modal optical fiber between the LED display, with its attendant camera and microphone, and the side of my core room, with enough slack in the cabling system to allow my core room to travel to the bottom of the shaft, with slack to spare, a retracting spool system kept the cable taut and untangled. The optical transceiver I connected to one of the input wires in my pedestal, and then at 1:30 in the morning, I enabled the power to the microphone, and the optical transceivers, and was rewarded with the faint sound of the wind rustling the grass, and an owl hooting on its perch. The sensation of hearing, via my pedestal, and the connected microphone was quite odd, I could hear the sounds, but I had difficulty placing where they were coming from. I decided, that since the sounds were being fed directly to me, to try and listen via my inner space, once I focused inward the sounds coming from the microphone were a fair bit louder, and in some fashion almost reverberated across my inner space. From within, it was easier to identify the source of the sounds, an area near the edge of my inner space, there was no direct indication of where in the real world the sounds originated from, besides the nature of the sounds, so that was going to be interesting.

It was around 3:30 in the morning that I had managed to run optical fiber from the other LED display combinations, and hooked them into my pedestal. I now had ambient sounds from three different sources playing across my inner space. With a few hours of practice, I learned how to preferentially select one of the inputs and listen to it exclusively, and also how to listen to either all or none of the inputs, it was an almost invigorating mental exercise. The problem I now wanted to tackle was video encoding, if I wanted to display the output of a camera to a screen, it probably would not have been such a complex problem, what I really wanted to do however, was to pipe the video directly to my core, and now that I better understood how audio input worked, dump that display directly into my inner space. After I succeeded in this new endeavor would be when I would start to tackle my main computer design, until then, I powered on the camera in the display attached to the cliff face, and after disconnecting the microphone, worked at intermixing the audio and video signals prior to sending them down the optical cable.

It was nearly dawn before I finally hit on what I thought would be the best method to get a video input to my core, the camera had infrared, ultraviolet, red, green, blue, and an alpha channel per pixel coming from the camera. I hadn’t skimped on the pixel count either, each camera had a resolution of 10,000 x 5,000 pixels, a number well in excess of the 7,680 x 4,320 in an 8k video stream back on Earth. All that was in addition to the raw audio coming from the camera’s associated microphone. It transpired that the key component to what I desired was the vacuum channel transistor design that I had implemented on a lark, simply to see if I could. My version of the transistor was slightly more efficient than the designs I had seen as a student back on Earth, and operated at 500GHz, up from the NASA version at 460GHz.

This fact allowed me to do something which in hindsight, should definitely not have worked as it did. I encoded each channel of each of the 50 million pixels using a signal amplitude based encoding, a thousand times a second and sent them across the optical fiber, multiplexed, each channel of 50 million pixels a single, incoming wire in my pedestal. As this almost 50 mega-bytes of data per frame hit my core across the six wires being used for incoming video, my inner space shuddered, the ball of twine rotation of my inner ball of plasma, paused, for the briefest of moments, before seeming to resume at its previous pace, and I was able to see the outside world, projected into my inner space as though it was on a big screen tv back on Earth. As I appreciated the quality of the image, it took me, what seemed to be a good thirty or so seconds, before I noticed that the sound of the grass rustling which had been coming through with perfect clarity previously, was now highly distorted. I wondered what was going on, and was about to try and start tracing the wires in the camera and microphone to see if I could identify the problem, when I happened to glance at my digital clock. I had for fun, setup the clock to display milliseconds previously, and was glad of that now, instead of flickering past in a barely intelligible blur, I could now actually see a small delay between each millisecond, before it flickered on to the next digit.

It took, what seemed to me, sixteen, almost seventeen seconds, before the clock displayed the next second. This ended up being the clue I needed to understand the phenomenon I was now experiencing. My core was displaying the thousand frames per second video, as though it was only sixty, except, that it wasn’t dropping frames to achieve this, it had sped up my perception of time, by almost seventeen times, allowing me to see the entirety of the video stream at what actually was 1000fps, despite not appearing to be, in my inner space. Regardless of how amazing this ability appeared, and it is definitely one that I would exploit in future. I decided that it would be for the best, that I, for the moment, shut off the camera until I put in a system to discard frames in the stream, such that I only received 60 frames per second in future. The disconnect between the audio and video streams was quite severe, and not something I really wanted to experience constantly.

Shutting off the video stream, was as jarring as turning it on in the first place. My inner ball of plasma, almost guttered in that moment before resuming its ball of twine rotation. I would need to design a method to ease me in and out of my enhanced perceptive state, if I didn’t want to accidentally extinguish myself one day. My dungeon had been open all night with no visitors, except a few bats that had flown in briefly before leaving, the bright lights and lack of good perches the deciding factors in their quick exit. As dawn arose past the mountains behind my dungeon entrance, I noticed the pair of griffons circling a bit to the north and west of where my entrance was, sigh, today was going to be a good day, first my accidental ability to speed up my perception of time, and now the sight of griffons circling, to brighten my day.

It was 9:30 in the morning almost two hours past dawn, when I finished setting up the other cameras, and hooking them up to my pedestal, despite having done that, I left them powered down for now. My night of testing and fiddling had brought me allot further along than I had expected, I had working, although some tweaks were still required, analog audio and raw digital video input directly into my core. My core doing the hard work of interpreting the video output as opposed to the processor I originally had in mind, I still needed that processor, in order to do more advanced things, such as video editing, and perhaps even giving me a virtual human avatar to manipulate, and thus interact with any potential visitors, I might in future have.

I had left my 129,000 pixel autonomic feedback display running essentially since I had built it. It didn’t serve the purpose I had originally intended it to have, but it was still an interesting experiment nonetheless. Perhaps, in the future I would be able to leverage it in a fashion, even remotely similar to what I had conceived originally, until then, at least it was calming to look at. Given my camera’s and their associated microphones only took up seven wires a piece, I still had 128,979 free input wires to use, for the moment, I would not go looking to fill too many of those, instead my next project would be a regulation system for my video inputs, allowing me to step-up and step-down my perception of time, by means of dropping frames from the camera video streams.

A couple of minutes before noon, I managed to finish my frame dropping system, allowing me to bump my perception of time, from 1x to 2x, 4x, 8x all the way to 16x, a quick test later, and I was able to verify that the impact on my inner space was significantly reduced, using this new step-up, step-down methodology. None too soon, as I saw what looked like an elf and a wolf man walk into the clearing by my entrance, in full fifty megapixel video. As soon as I spotted them, I ratcheted my perception of time back down to normal, although the slowed down version of the look of surprise on their faces was going to stay with me for a long time, I wanted to see if I was going to luck out and not have to learn a new language, and I couldn’t do that with the audio stream distorted into insensibility.

Thirty seconds later, some hand waving and some reasonably quiet words between my two visitors, and it was blatantly obvious I was not that lucky. The elf spoke a language that flowed and sounded vaguely like Spanish, although, it was obviously not, I mean, it could have been Basque or Catalan, for all I knew, heck, what little Spanish I knew was from having taken it in high-school and living in California. The wolf man replied back to the elf, in the same language, although, even I could tell from the accent that it wasn’t native to him. Another couple of minutes of back and forth between the two, and they trudged up towards my entrance. They paused at the entrance, just within view of my camera, and looked into my well lit entryway with its perfectly flat walls and level floor, then looked at each other and had another quick conversation between the two of them, the look of confusion on their faces plain to see, even with my lack of socialization. Based on where they were standing, I was likely going to need a new camera, or two, just to make sure I could see visitors to my dungeon in the entryway itself and not just as they walked up to, and just past the LED display which I would use for a welcome message etc, at the entryway on the cliff face, to the right of my dungeon entrance. Sigh, yet another instance of poor planning on my part.

The elf at that moment turned slightly and visibly flinched seeing the door to the bunk house I had put right near the entrance, another quick back and forth between him and the wolf man, led them to cautiously open the door, it swung inward into the bunk-room, on silent hinges, the motion sensor above the door on the inside noting the lack of movement after almost thirty seconds, engaged the motor to close the door, the slight whirring sound of the motor was noticeable to the wolf man, as his ears twitched, and he swung his hand, holding a wicked looking axe, into the doorway, the motion sensor, promptly reversed the motion of the engine, reopened the door, and reset the timer on the motor. It was definitely going to be fun watching these visitors of mine.