Joule tapped the blue screen, frustrated.

She'd developed an avatar recently, a humanoid torso with long brown hair and blue eyes. She had initially wanted to make the lower half an ant, but that had felt embarrassing for some reason. Instead, she'd opted for a massive centipede-like trunk, and that felt close enough to the insect realm that it felt comfortable. Not to mention she could be as tall as she wanted.

Anyway, the screen.

{data_value/Null=infinity}

It didn't make sense at all. Joule decided to pull up Noah to see what his quantification said.

{data_value/Noah_Cosmic=&#%^7!$g07}

As usual, her matrix couldn't quite handle his rank.

And herself?

{data_value/Joule=84104}

Eighty-four thousand. It made sense, seeing as most of her 'body' was a supercomputer the size of a mansion. But Null was just an ant, even if he was a powerful one.

If quantifying him as a whole didn't produce correct results, what about the individual parts?

{data_value/Null(void_reserves)=1467}

It seemed accurate enough, but-

[Hey, Joule.]

She turned towards one of the other screens, a live feed prominently featuring a clear ball with a shadow in the center, rolling in mud.

[Yes?]

[How do I clean a slime?]

[...I'm sure he'll be fine.]

[If you say so.]

She turned back to her quantification board.

{data_value/Null(physical_ability)=794}

Again, that seemed to be accurate. Null was a lot stronger than he thought he was.

So why? Why was her quantifier malfunctioning? There was no feasible way that Null's overall value was infinity. It was simply inexplicable.

Wait. Noah had mentioned something during her alpha stage. She pulled up the recording.

"...yeah, you know. Pictures worth a thousand words, friends are irreplaceable, right?"

She turned back to her screen and typed rapidly.

{data_value/Null(friendship)=infinity}

Infinity? INFINITY? How was a relationship, a concept, worth infinity? It shouldn't have been possible in any realm of the word, and yet here she was, staring at a screen that displayed the polite little sideways eight.

She sat down, calculating quickly. If concepts could be ranked so highly on her own level, how did she know that Noah simply didn't have a vast amount of deep and worthwhile relationships? So many infinities would surely be incalculable!

...Then again, with his personality, it was more likely that he was just unbelievably powerful.

Her centipede half skittered over the digital floor as she moved over to a console, typing in an important command.

{calculate/friendship(data_value)=?}

The program would run until it figured out all possible variations of the correct answer. She may not understand all of what was happening, but she knew that she would, sooner or later.

A new program came in on one of the primary monitors, and she moved over to inspect it. It was Bubbles' quantification - it'd apparently only just finished.

Taking a good look at his abilities, Joule realized that his overall statistics were quite a bit higher than Null's when he'd started out. Then again, he wasn't exactly improving quickly. For whatever reason, no one could quite remember what had happened when Bubbles dumped his subspace. It was as if the memory had been deleted. It was a decent guess, given that Noah had been right next to the splash radius.

Coiling her lower half into a pile, she decided to start going through the slime's statistics.

{data_value/Bubbles(durability)=???}

Already?