System Architect

I ran up to my room as soon as I got back from school. Dad had put the laptop on my night stand with a sticky note of the wifi name and password. I eagerly turned the computer on and went through the process of adding the programs I would need in order to be effective—most of what I was used to had yet to be created, and what I was stuck using felt so… archaic.

It would take a while to get used to not having many of the conveniences that I’d grown used to over the years. The technology was perfectly serviceable, and yet everything that was missing was glaringly obvious. That was maybe something I could focus on to make some money, but I wasn’t really skilled enough to do it. I was good at setting up computers—like I was currently doing—but tasks much beyond that might as well have been a foreign language.

With all of that being what it was, I decided to read some of the book Grandpa Joe had given me while the computer finished its update-restart cycles. The book was rather dry and uninteresting. I flipped through the unread pages with one hand while the other kept my current page marked. That was when I noticed the book held a secret.

About two thirds of the way through the door stop, several pages had been hollowed out to hide a thumb drive. I carefully extracted it from the book and looked it over with my trained eye. I knew there were plenty of dangers when dealing with thumb drives, so I went through each and every exploit I could recall having dealt with. It wasn’t exhaustive, but it was fairly thorough. I didn’t see any issues, but I was still going to be cautious about it, even if that meant it would take more time before I could dig into the drive.

I set the laptop aside so that it could create a quarantined virtual machine and install some programs on it. While not perfect, it was the best I had. When dealing with this kind of potentially secret data, I’d rather take as few risks as I could. I trusted Grandpa Joe, but that didn’t mean he was incapable of being tricked.

While the laptop churned away, I set about completing the rest of my daily quests. The pull-up bar came in handy again as the day’s main antagonist of a quest was all about the upper body. I cursed at just how sore my arms felt after the workout—not as sore as when I’d first started exercising, but it still was rather unpleasant.

When I checked my experience after the quest was completed, I was happy to see that I had the requisite 500 for the next item on my list.

Feature Unlocked: Milestones II

Current Exp: 36

I didn’t notice any changes upon unlocking the feature, but that didn’t mean nothing had happened. Instead, it just meant that I had to discover what it did. The description gave me some idea of what it did, but actually achieving a milestone would solidify it. That these were less straightforward than the Milestones I ones made it more difficult. I gave up as soon as the laptop alerted me that it was done.

I slid the thumb drive into the slot cautiously. My heart hammered in my chest as I went through all of the safety protocols before opening the drive and then the files inside. What I found brought a smile to my face.

Aside from a crypto wallet with a few coins in it—I’d checked—there were files from Grandpa Joe that included several code phrases. Among them were a couple that related to the situation I found myself in. Kangaroo Jackfruit—time travel, one way; and Planetary Orange—alien invasion, multiple species. At least, that’s the closest I could find for magic appearing everywhere all at once with monsters and such… I mean, dragons and kobolds counted as separate alien species, right?

I had no idea what to actually do with those code words, but at least it was a starting point for a conversation with Grandpa Joe. Included as well was a note from him.

Milton,

I hope this letter finds you well. Your mother told me about your predicament, so I went through my old things to see what I had that might be of some help. The crypto wallet is tracked, so talk to me before you use it. There shouldn’t be any issues as it’s mine and the government gave it to me for emergencies. Still, it would be best to tread carefully. I’ve included an excerpt from my old code book in case that’s the route you decide to go. We can talk about that when you’re here next.

Your mother doesn’t know what I used to do. She thinks my knowledge is a hobby, but that’s just what I was told to say. I can’t say more—though if you truly came from the future, there’s a chance you know. Please don’t spill the beans while I’m alive. I made an oath that I’d rather not break.

I hope you get good use out of my old laptop. You can reach out to me via email or give me a call any time. Anything more sensitive, we can talk about in person.

Love,

Grandpa Joe

I sighed and copied the email address over from the virtual machine to the real one and sent a reply thanking him for the laptop and the book. When I was satisfied that I’d gotten all I could from the thumb drive, I unplugged it and shut down the virtual machine.

I went downstairs to eat with Dad before going back upstairs to do some research before bed. I surveyed the current state of Internet self-publishing and what genres existed in the direction I wanted to go. Even if I never got around to publishing it, starting on a story would be a good way to think through some of the issues I would face in the future. That it was also a good creative outlet didn’t hurt either.

I was excited to find that the whole system apocalypse genre wasn’t a thing yet. I couldn’t find anything on it. Even stories based on video games were few and far between. It hadn’t invaded the collective consciousness like it would in future years. That meant I had the opportunity to be one of the pioneers of the genre if I played my cards right. The only catch was that the usual places where that kind of story was shared didn’t yet exist.

That was going to be a problem. A problem that I would have to solve… another day. As much as I felt the rabbit hole beckoning, I knew my limits and shut off my laptop before I could get trapped. Instead, I got ready for bed and lay down. I thought about possible story ideas while I slowly drifted off to sleep.

At school the following day, I continued to bounce ideas around in my head. I tried to get some thoughts from the other kids, but nothing was all that inspirational. By the time I got home, I’d decided on something rather generic. If I was going to write something, it would have to play into all the tropes—how else did I expect they would become tropes?

Regardless, the story was a good outlet to complete my writing tasks as they came up. It didn’t matter how good the story was—I thought it was alright—but rather how many words I wrote. Even half a chapter a day seemed like a good pace to me in that it was enough to finish my weekly quest in time and take care of any dailies I ended up getting along the way.

I was surprised, Wednesday evening, with a notification when I was done writing.

Milestone: Wrote 1 chapter

Exp Gained: 1

I guessed that was something unlocked by Milestones II, and getting it gave me some ideas of other things to try out over the coming days.

I tried many things, but I wasn’t able to get anything more out of Milestones II by the time Friday afternoon rolled around. It was immensely frustrating—and a huge letdown—to spend 500 experience on a feature that did basically nothing. It held great promise on the surface, but there wasn’t anything under that veneer that I could find. I wondered if there was something I was doing wrong, but I pushed it aside as there was something more important.

Feature Unlocked: Search

Current Exp: 62

Now that I had unlocked Search, I had everything I needed to explore the options the stupid System I was stuck with had. System Help let me see what each option did while Search let me find them without having to cause an error and guess what the feature would do if I got it.

As I dug into it, I realized that there were just. So. Many. Options. It was overwhelming. Even aggressive filtering hardly cut down on the sheer deluge of information in front of me. Despite the vast number of choices, I was able to make some broad observations.

First, any way I wanted to build a system would work. I could do a traditional RPG, cultivation, swappable skills, classes, and anything else I could imagine. I could even mix and match—although there were some downsides there with compatibility. The requirements for some features depended on other features while also excluding yet further features as being incompatible.

A knock-on effect of this was that there would be features which would be incredibly important for me to get if I wanted to succeed that might not work with whatever System architecture I ended up going with. Like personal magic spells if I chose to go with a System that didn’t have any internal energy like mana or chi. Something I’d have to at least be aware of going forward.

Second, the Search function showed me only what I searched for rather than what I wanted to find. It was only as intelligent as I was. If there was something that would be helpful but I didn’t think to search for it, I would never find it.

There were several more ways of earning experience that I’d initially missed, and I knew that there were probably more that I was still missing. I’d need several people to bounce ideas off of to ensure that even if I didn’t get the perfect solution, I at least got something good enough. I didn’t want to miss anything too obvious.

Finally, I saw that getting enough experience to build a functioning and useful System was going to be really hard—maybe even impossible. I was going to have to make compromises and sacrifices to get it all to work well enough, and that scared me.

What I needed more than anything was help. Acknowledging my fathers disdain for anything fantasy-related, I knew my best option was Mom. Even then, she wasn’t the best choice. She wasn’t a gamer. Not really. However, the games she did play were primarily puzzle games. Even if she didn’t know all of the terminology, she might have some thoughts that would shed light on my own blind spots.

At dinner, I explained my predicament to Dad and asked if I could talk to Mom on the phone. He punched in the number when we were done cleaning up and I went upstairs to my room for privacy.

“Hello?” Mom asked when she picked up.

“Hi, Mom,” I said.

“Oh, hey Eddy. I thought your father was calling me.”

“Nope! I needed to talk to you.”

“Is something wrong?”

“No, not really. I got Search like you suggested. There are just so many options to go through. I’ve found some useful ones, but I know I’m missing a bunch and I thought you could help.”

“Let’s start at the beginning then. What have you found?”

“Well, I found a bunch that unlock ways of earning more experience. They all seem useful, but they start getting rather expensive—especially if I want to get them for more than just myself.”

“I see. And any way to modify how much experience you get? Like a multiplier or something like that?”

“Sadly not…. Wait, there’s one that adds an amount to the experience gained rather than multiplying the result. It’s expensive. Really expensive.”

“It still could be worth it.”

“Maybe, but then there are the monster levels to worry about with something like that.”

“That’s true. Hmmm… What about ways of gaining strength that don’t involve experience?”

I shook my head even though she couldn’t see it through the phone.

“That might work—but only as part of whatever system I build. We’ll need to go over that at some point for sure, but it’s not immediately helpful.”

“Well, is there a way you can give yourself more time?”

“What do you mean? The timer says I have about 15 years, where would the time come from?”

“Like delaying the timer or going back in time or something?”

“But how would… Oh…” Using Search, I got a hit. “Mom, you’re a genius!”

“Thanks? What did you find?”

“You’re not going to believe it, but there’s an option to reset and go back in time to when this started. It’s rather expensive and there are some glaring downsides to it. But that would give me the extra time I need in order to build a working System.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. So it looks like whatever I unlocked for myself will go away, but the monsters won't reset. However, anything I’ve unlocked for everyone will remain unlocked from the start of the reset. This means I’ll have double the time to get everything!”

“That’s great!” Mom said with a laugh. “Maybe the next time through you’ll be able to tell me what the stock market will do!”

“That would be helpful, wouldn’t it?” I chuckled. “Thanks, Mom. If you have any other thoughts, just email me. I got the laptop all set up and made an email so you can reach me there any time.”

I gave Mom my email address before ending the call and handing the phone back to Dad. Even if the monsters would get stronger, a reset changed everything.