About three hours ago, looking in on the bunk room of James’s Dungeon.

I watched my guests for a few minutes as the elf awoke and started his day, I recalled with some amusement the moment both of them tried their muscles and their knives to try and remove the mattresses from their bunks. Fat chance of that happening, muscles and an iron or steel knife, are no match for a twine of graphene the width of a human hair. The mattress itself I also made of graphene and had bonded the mattress and its attaching twine at the atomic level to the bunk. The physics half of my double major back at Stanford, may not have been concentrated on the material sciences, but I could fake it to some degree, especially now when I could synthesize the material I was thinking of directly, as opposed to having to try a chemical deposition method as I would have had to do back on Earth, not to mention, I couldn’t have produced the relatively vast quantities I had used so far in my dungeon.

As the elf started warming up their leftover stew, I got back to my circuit designs, spending the next hour real time, fully accelerated, experiencing 16 hours of planning and arithmetic, checking over my circuit designs. One of my goals for my computational architecture was that it had to tolerate fully hot-pluggable components, including the CPU, GPU and memory, in addition to the storage system. Designing the logic around registering the components, and in the case of the CPU and GPU’s, advertising to the bus the available instructions the newly attached component would provide, was proving to be quite an annoyance so far. I still wasn’t quite finished as my two guests started to pack up their gear, it wasn’t obvious to me whether or not they were leaving or going to check out the rooms I had built as a starter dungeon, at least, not until the exited the bunk room and turned in towards the dungeon proper. I watched the pair of them as they noticed my high voltage doorway blocking system, I had ionized the air between the sides of the door using a relatively low powered UV laser, and then pushed almost 750,000 volts at a few milliamperes worth of power to keep the door non-lethal, but have an effect much like a stun-gun back on Earth. I could have predicted that the wolf-man would get shocked by the door, that metal haft on the axe would be the death of him in a lighting storm.

Watching them start to puzzle out my light puzzle for a few minutes made me rue the fact I could not put intelligible directions on the wall next to the panel. I gave a mental head shake and got back to work, this time on designing the components that would extend the main CPU data bus over fiber optic cable, so as to attach additional main boards to my initial board emplacement. Unlike on Earth where I would have used plastic as the primary insulator for the circuit boards, here I leveraged diamond, as it too was an insulator, and a good one. I had been using diamond already to insulate my electrical transmission lines and the cables I had used in the motors I had put in place. I was tempted to leverage graphene’s properties as a good conductor of electricity, instead of the silver I had put in place initially, throughout my dungeon, however, silver was cheaper for me to synthesize, in terms of energy requirements, and it was a good enough conductor, that I had no issues using it as a replacement for copper in traditional electrical, and even electronic applications. I was still leveraging graphene in many other places for its superb tensile strength, and its transparency. In most cases where I wanted good strength, but a non-transparent material, I leveraged Polyacrylonitrile, (C3H3N)n, more commonly known back on Earth as carbon fiber, and then just because I could, coated the material in two layers of graphene, for additional strength.

After another 16 hours of accelerated time on my part, I had just managed to plan out how I wanted the individual CPU’s to handle their integer ALU’s (Arithmetic Logic Units) and also how I wanted the inbound instruction queues to work. Unlike how modern Earth x86_64 CPU’s leveraged two inbound instruction queues to produce the effect of an additional CPU core, known as hyper-threading, I had eight inbound instruction queues, able to call subsections of my almost over-complicated ALU design individually and independently, allowing certain instruction trees to complete their operations in a fully parallelized fashion, in effect due to the over complicated design giving me a virtual eight CPU cores per actual CPU. I had designed a multiple bit width ALU structure, allowing the CPU to handle a pair of 256 bit ALU operations at the same time as four 128 bit operations, eight 64 bit operations, sixteen 32 bit operations and 32 16 bit operations simultaneously. This allowed my eight instruction queues to each run 64 bit math operations simultaneously, in a non-blocking fashion. Beside my custom ALU design, I leveraged part of the FPU design which had ended up in the calculator reward at the end of my dungeon, and in the one I was using now to help check over my designs, however, I scaled it up from it’s 80 bit width all the way to 320 bit. In the final design I leveraged two 320 bit queues, four 240 bit queues, eight 160 bit queues and 16 80 bit queues. All told my design was quite complex, and in some respects over engineered, however, I wanted this design to last my dungeon quite a while, and limiting myself to 16, 32 or even 64 bit architectures would mean I would have to revisit my CPU designs sooner than later.

If I had gone with a 64 bit CPU architecture, I would have had access to 16 exabytes of memory, that is a significant amount (kilo, mega, giga, tera, peta, exa), however, as an example,1 second of raw video, from one camera contained fifty megabytes of data, I would be able to store 1 years worth of raw video, from ten-thousand cameras just over 120 million times in memory. The fact of the matter was, I was hoping to gather and analyze significantly more data than that, both from my dungeon and the rest of the world, and the luxury of the extra addressable space would serve me in good stead as I grew out my infrastructure, thus my flimsy excuse for designing the borderline ludicrous 256 bit architecture I had.

I looked back at my guests just after hour 17 of work and they had finally completed the first puzzle, it seemed from the glances I had taken of them whilst I was laboring away at my poor-core’s version of an EE circuit designer application, that the bulk of the time they had spent on the puzzle was figuring out how to manipulate the controls I had put in place, and what the purpose of the puzzle was. Figuring out how to communicate with my guests would have been going high on my priority list, if it wasn’t already there. I know it was, I checked my priority list file, there it was at item 2, number 1 was building a CPU to control the dungeon and facilitate item 2. I had offered them the choice to continue or go back after the first puzzle, I was delighted, that they were going on to the second room where I offered the calculator as the reward to solving that puzzle. I was going to have to check on their progress more often whilst they were in the second room, I didn’t want to miss their reactions to the calculator.

As I got back to work, I started working on my initial main board design. I continued my theme of ludicrous overkill, and placed 1000 cpu sockets on the board, I left the management of what instructions went to what CPU to the north bridge management controller, as I also had it handle registering, and de-registering CPU’s connected to the board. The controller like everything else, I designed, to be highly redundant and having more bandwidth at hand than was ever going to be needed. The MMU I had designed earlier, I tweaked to match my more fleshed out plans, and had 2000 memory module attachments, two per CPU, with a dedicated interconnected fabric between them, allowing each CPU to have access to a “local” memory, that was guaranteed low latency, and also the rest of the memory system, at a slightly higher latency. Designing the memory system in this manner, also allowed me to interconnect multiple main boards, and simply connect the CPU fabrics, and the memory fabrics to their counterparts on the remote board. Despite how easily this was described, it was some eight hours of accelerated time later, that I glanced over at the second puzzle room, and noticed they had finished the puzzle and were about to open up the cabinet containing the solar powered calculator, which was my initial prize for having solved my two dungeon puzzles.

I watched them in anticipation of their reactions, I was hoping for excitement, and perhaps puzzlement. What I got from my visitors however, was disappointment, they appeared almost dejected upon receiving the calculator. The wolf-man’s ears drooped, drooped, I say. I slowed back down to real-time, and watched and listened to their conversation, their tired tones of voice as they stored my small marvel of electronics, and trudged back to the bunk room. This reaction to my dungeon would not do, not at all.

I got back to work, accelerating myself up to full speed, I paused my computer design, and decided to try and construct at least some form of sound based communication to go with the text output I could achieve at the moment. I recalled the music lessons of my youth, my parents despairing of my lack of talent, and a small formula allowing me to calculate the hertz of the various notes on the piano starting from A4 at 440 Hertz, f (frequency) = 440 * 2^((n-49)/12), where n, is the nth key on the piano from A4. A tone generator matched to the formula, some quick testing, and a quick keyboard, and I was able to R2D2, my way to at least have tonal communication. I added a quick decibel meter, and limiter to the speaker system so as to not injure my guests with an overly loud note accidentally. All of this fiddling around took me almost two hours of accelerated time, my guests having arrived back at the bunk room about an hour and a half ago, from my perspective. They had finally pulled the calculator back out from their pack and had it sitting on the table between them, a sheet of parchment on the table, a pen and ink blotter close at hand. I slowed my perception back down to real time so as to better understand what was going on, although my local language skills were still zero.

It seems they had realized that some symbols added a number to the display, others didn’t seem to do anything, at least until they pressed more. They were trying to catalog what everything did, it looked like it would take them quite a while. Additionally there was some small discussion back and forth, trying to decide what additional symbols to press next. I decided that I needed to stage a small intervention, also, test my ability to communicate with my guests. I enabled the display at the front of the room by the door, which was immediately below the camera I was using to watch my guests, in the same panel. I then played a two note chime, reminiscent of the some doorbells back on Earth. Given how high they jumped, spilling their pot of ink on their parchment in the process, you would have thought I had hit both of them with a cattle-prod. It was too bad I didn’t really have a good method to store images from the camera’s just yet, that would have been well worth saving.

My two guests immediately noticed the white display that had previously been dark, and as they approached the display, I placed my first message to my guests on the screen. I was trying to go for a congenial tone, but considering they wouldn’t be able to understand the text I put on screen either, I kept things short. “Hello guests, here is some help: ”, followed by a new line, and short set of examples of basic math problems to demonstrate the basic symbols and functions of the calculator I had gifted them. I watched them intently, as they glanced at each other, then examined what I had written on the screen. The slow raising of the elf’s eyebrows, the wolf-mans widening eyes and rising fur, as they followed along, were kind of fascinating. As they got down to some of the later examples, they turned, and started gesticulating, almost wildly to each other as they spoke rapidly, the at first slight smiles that broke out into full on grins as the conversation went on, made everything worth it. I had thrown the first stone into the pond, metaphorically speaking, now I just needed to see what the ripples would bring.