《Goddess of Computation》 chapter5.h
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"I can't believe I'm saying this but the systemhelper is even worse than Siri," Ada muttered in frustration and sat down.
She had just turned off systemhelper. This was after half an hour of trying to converse with the program to find a class that can help her either figure out where she is or provide her a faster mode of travel than just running. Ada realized that she needed to know this after looking over the worldmap data. Her perfect memory helped immensely where she mentally sorted the parameters of latitude, longitude and biome classification and arranged it on a 2D grid in her mind. Through this mental map, she was able to determine that there were only three grassland biomes in the world. Unfortunately, each of these places covered huge areas and if she didn't go in the right direction, she would end up either at an equally desolate ocean or desert.
The systemhelper turned out to be completely useless. The standard library has nothing above the level of medieval era technology. Never until now had Ada realized how easily she took GPS, the Internet or smartphones for granted like most people on Earth. As far as a method of travel goes, there were no classes for cars, motorcycles, trains or even bicycles. There was a class for a sailship but that would be worthless on land. After giving up on modern technology, she decided to try traditional tech for travel, i.e. animals such as horses. On Earth, the fastest method of traveling for millennia was the horse. She had no idea if this world has any domesticated animals for transportation but after some futile attempts, she realized there was one of three possibilities:
1) This world doesn't have any horses, elephants, camels, etc.
2) The standard library doesn't have any of these classes.
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3) The standard library does have these classes but she wasn't allowed to access them.
"You would think that being a goddess personally appointed by God to change the world would imply that I would at least know where I am," Ada huffed.
"I suppose I could build an engine or a battery to power some vehicle with wheels but I'm not entirely sure what that would require," Ada said as she dug through her brain where her perfect memory revealed absolutely nothing useful in regards to practical engineering. For the first time ever, she regretted not going into a robotics summer camp back as a junior in high school. She had instead chosen to take a course on programming at a local community college that summer. This choice wasn't any less nerdy but Ada felt that suited her more; she always felt more inclined to code on the computer than get her hands dirty with actual hardware. This is probably why I was chosen as the goddess of computation instead of crafting or engineering, she thought.
Last that she checked, in this world of Urth, there were no gods dedicated to the craft of engineering or design. The ancient Greeks had Hephaestus, the god of craftsmen, and Athena, the goddess of wisdom. The Hindus have Vishwakarma, the god of engineers and architects. Why this world lacked what most human mythology would consider a basic god was beyond her. On the other hand, even if there was such a god or goddess, Ada doubted that she would contact that entity. Given her stunted divine capabilities and lacking any knowledge of the motives of the other gods, she wouldn't risk initiating contact. This led her back to realizing that she would have to figure out everything on her own.
Feeling self-defeated, she suddenly thought of a piece of wisdom her dad would frequently say to her -- when hard thinking doesn't work, try not thinking at all. At the thought of her dad, she felt a surge of sadness coupled with a deep sense of loneliness. Nothing was familiar here and there was no one she could talk to. She wished that she could give him a call and just hear his voice. Even if he couldn't help resolve her current quandary, talking with him always calmed her down to where she could better handle the problem herself.
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"If my dad was here, what would he say?" Ada wondered aloud. "He would tell me to close my eyes and take a few deep breathes. Calm down. For a few minutes, with my eyes closed, just focus on breathing and not thinking."
Ada closed her eyes and meditated for a few moments. After a minute, she snapped her eyes open and facepalmed herself.
"Duh! If I'm higher up in the sky, I could easily see distinguishable geographical features and cross reference its location with that of my world map. My eyes aren't any better than that of a mortal but that doesn't matter," she shouted.
She remembered that when she was above a mile above the ground, she hasn't noticed any distinguishable landmarks. If she went higher though -- which would require changing her platform's density -- she should be able to see features which would enable her to figure out where she was. Ada wasn't worried about dying from lack of air or the cold seeing that she had survived in space just fine. She was sure that the density of her palace walls was greater than that of the cloud and so if she transmuted some of parts of the wall to more clouds, her platform should rise higher up in the atmosphere.
"Unpause systemhelper! Create cloud!"
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As her floating palace started rising into the atmosphere, Ada had another thought:
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"Well, I'm done. It was worth a shot."
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"Pause systemhelper. I guess I will just have to stick with making a pinhole camera if I really need to get a better picture from up here."
Two and a half minutes later, after she converted some of her palace walls to more clouds, Cloud Ada rose in altitude to at least two miles. Ada looked out and saw a long range of relatively low mountains next to a sparkling sea with a small island in the distance. Correlating those two geographical features in their relative positions to her mental map database, she smiled. Ada knew where she was.
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