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Hocus, Pocus, Hypothesis 139
🕑 Added 2025-11-14 18:00:16 +0000 UTC⍝ bands/window/safety
B←'Vital' 'Luminous' 'Arcane' 'Elemental' 'Veil' 'Resonant' ⋄ W←2048 ⋄ O←0.5 ⋄ α←0.01 ⋄ ε←1E¯6 ⋄ η←0.02 ⋄ H←0.5-0.5×2○(2×○1×(⍳W)÷W-1)
The actual laser work was taking a bit longer than Orion had expected, but he ended up with more space than he initially thought, so he was making good use of it by adding redundancies and efficiency loops to ensure the framework could withstand much more than the previous version.
No frying my face after trying to inspect a tier five mage this time.
⍝ gates
amp←α×(consent∧(∨/interdict)∧(∧/external)) ⋄ mode←(amp>0)/'active','passive' ⍝ consent precomputed booleans
Even after he finished with it, he still needed to connect them to the System, but thanks to his talk with Vaar, he now had a reliable way.
I just need to use the molten lump that is V1 as a catalyst to summon it without an actual class ceremony. Nothing difficult about that.
The sarcasm helped him feel a little better. Orion was fully aware that using unorthodox methods to interact with the System was very risky, as the events that caused V1’s destruction could prove, but his only other choice was to return to the Sanctum and hijack a Class Ceremony.
That, however, would put him in front of Seraphina, and he really didn’t want to know what she would think of his actions or if she would feel compelled to stop him.
⍝ passive capture → FFT → magnitude/phase → bandpowers/entropy
S←WinSlice⍠('W' W)⍠('O' O) audio ⋄ F←H×S ⋄ Y←⎕FFT F ⋄ Mag←|Y ⋄ Ph←∠Y
M←BandMap ⍴Mag ⋄ BP←M+.×Mag ⋄ P←(Mag+ε)÷(+/Mag)+ε ⋄ Ent←-+/P×⍟P
Orion momentarily turned off the laser, allowing the CC to cool down. He flipped the cielinite frame over, inspecting his work carefully, but he couldn't find any flaws so far.
“I have enough to do it all over again, but I really don’t want to. The time is already tight enough as it is.”
There was always the chance of canceling the sparring session with the Vigil’s squires. Building V2 was definitely more important, both now and in the future. However, Orion had been working hard to build bridges and, if not make friends, then at least earn the respect of others who would someday lead their factions.
This might be a small thing, but he wasn’t about to start messing things up when he’d just gotten his plans on track.
⍝ Stab←1÷1+⌈/Var Mag ⍬ ⋄ Co←(+/Mag*2)÷(+/Mag+ε)∘.+(+/Mag+ε)
⍝ N←amp×Probe Nfreq ⋄ R←⎕FFT(H×(S+N)) ⋄ τ←1÷(1+⌈/Var |R)
⍝ feat←Norm (BP,Ent,Co,Stab,τ,Peaks Mag,Skew Mag)
The actual process of summoning the System would hopefully be painless. He just needed to somehow connect his own link, which was easily accessible by checking his status screen, and the one held by the melted glasses.
The only problem was that by messing with such a delicate thing, he risked overwhelming any of the three sides. Since the System was far more resilient than either him or the glasses, he doubted it would suffer even if he failed catastrophically.
But losing the glasses would be a setback, and injuring himself was clearly not ideal.
With most of the actual coding finished, he began adding the protocols needed for everything to function properly, which were fortunately much more streamlined thanks to all the foundational work he had done earlier.
⍝ graph-conditioned Bayesian classifier
logp←π+G+.×(Wf+.×feat) ⋄ p←*logp ⋄ post←p÷+/p
⍝ falsification pass
Δ←Checks feat post ⋄ post←(1-η)×post+η×Δ
tier/level estimators from harmonic spacing & power scaling
tier←⌊1+⍴Peaks Mag ⋄ lvl←LevelEst feat tier
And finally, the UI modules, which were densely packed with meaning, as he could easily draw from his own Knowledge to define specific terms he was intimately familiar with and didn’t need to waste processing power on.
⍝ artifact fusion + slow prior update + conservative UI render
post←FuseArtifacts post (ToolsSig tool) ⋄ π←(1-η)×π+η×post ⋄ UI←Render (mode consent (~∨/interdict)) (post tier lvl Conf post)
And that was it. Orion shut off the laser for the last time and took in his hard work.
The frames were made of cielinite, giving them a whitish look with a slight pink tint. They honestly didn’t look bad, especially since Orion hadn’t really cared much about their appearance beyond making sure they didn’t clash with the majority of the clothes he’d been forced to buy.
While V1 had a bulkier, wayfarer-style appearance, V2 was sleeker and potentially more fashionable, though Orion wasn’t sure how Earth’s trends would carry over here.
It didn’t really matter in the end, as he carefully pressed the monetite lenses into place, smiling as they easily clicked into position with a satisfying sound.
He heated the metal with another laser burst to ensure it was soft enough for the lenses to adhere properly and form the glasses into a single piece. Afterward, he lifted them and nodded to himself.
“A good job, if I do say so myself.”
Out of curiosity, he put them on, feeling the legs gently slide behind his ears and the bridge lightly rest on his nose.
“They really are lighter,” he murmured, but was quickly captivated by the way he could see through them.
Initially, he was afraid he might be stuck with a permanent yellow filter. He would have made the sacrifice if that was necessary to give V2 enough processing power to analyze people’s actual status, not just the surface, but it turned out that wasn’t the case.
His brain and eyes easily compensated for the tiny amount of color left after he sheared the monetite into thin lenses, meaning his eyesight remained essentially unchanged.
But by looking in his reflection on the steel table, he could see that his eyes were slightly obscured, making it harder to tell what he was looking at or feeling.
It hadn’t been his intention, but it was a welcome benefit. It also made him look a bit more badass, as the purple of his eyes almost matched the pink hue of the frames when seen through the lenses, giving him a very distinct look and an even more piercing stare.
Once he finished basking in his successful forging, he moved on to the difficult part and paused to summon his status screen.
ORION A. VOIDWALKER
Class: [Causal Epistemologist] [B-rank]
Level: 52
Mind: 218
Attunement: 209
Body: 29
Traits: Mana Manipulation [B-rank]; Hypotheticism [B-rank]; Falsifiability Criterion [B-rank]
It was quite decent in his view, but Orion hoped it would improve even more once he finished this project. The System had rewarded him handsomely last time, and V2 was far better than V1.
“Now, how to go about this,” he murmured. His talk with Vaar had been enlightening, but despite the old man's vast experience and skill, there was a clear disconnect between what they considered possible and how they would achieve their goals.
Vaar was an alchemist. Like Yue and Asteria, he approached this as a matter of balance and tried to use the V1’s imbalance to make the System fill it with its presence.
Maybe that could work. Orion was sure that others with skill had their own ways of doing what he was trying to do. But it wouldn’t work for him because he wasn’t an alchemist and didn’t share their beliefs.
No, he was a scientist and knew the System to be a machine of some kind, if an infinitely complex one. He had to use his own methods to connect the two.
Orion placed the broken lenses on a velvet pad and steadied his hands. He knew they still bore a faint impression of the System’s touch from Asteria’s ceremony; if there was a way to make the new pair “seen” by that same gaze, it would begin here.
He built a small interferometer on his workbench using silverite posts, the finest quartz from his collection, and a monetite wafer that acted as a tunable mirror to improve resonance.
The Computing Crystal vibrated in his hand, transmitting sub-nanosecond phase sweeps through the setup as he watched the readout. Most signals looked like noise and drifted, but then, suddenly, a steady kink appeared in the Arcane and Vital traces whenever he empowered the shard with some mana.
Something is echoing the ping back. I’m in.
He recorded the impulse as a compact waveform and labeled it σ_sys: the attention kernel.
It was a solid start, but he needed to connect the signal to himself. To do that, he put on the glasses and checked his status five times at different intervals, wanting to make sure the success was not just a fluke.
He then averaged the traces, subtracted the background radiation from the Field, and identified a stable co-activation vector, mostly Vital-Arcane with a slight shift into Veil.
What remained, he labeled κ_orion and leaned back, smiling despite himself. He now had a recognizable signature and a personal handshake.
I can't do much more with it now, but I’m sure it will be useful again in the future.
He turned to the lenses he’d crafted to complement the CC’s signal, even though he knew they would be useless once this was over, as they would absorb most of the transmission damage. Each was a complex glass device with a three-path resonator embedded in the rim, connected to the CC via hair-thin leads.
It felt wasteful to burn through so much good material, but he refused to be a hoarder. He needed the best stuff to maximize his chances of success, even if it meant spending everything he had.
Two safety geometries were etched into the substrate: a Causal Bridle that minimized any detectable Field activity, and a closed-loop system that would prevent the whole thing from blowing up in his face.
Over the course of another cycle, he verified that the energy input matched the energy output. The loop provided important information, but it did not exert force, just as he intended.
Once that was done, he designed the handshake. The carrier was a phase-only loop, but the envelope, a quasi-periodic timing constructed from prime gaps blended with golden-ratio spacing, would ensure its permanence.
There won’t be any disruption of the signal, at least on my end.
It would also seem like intelligence to any adjudicator who valued invariants and low action, thereby preventing the System from eliminating it. At the front, he embedded a brief preamble formed from sys, then weighted the bands by κorion, tagging the request with his own signature.
The CC assembled the pattern within the strict limits he had set, leaving him with only the final step to take.
It adjusted the resonator until the returning passive quiver aligned with σ_sys within the established tolerance levels. Orion grunted, powering the frame with another burst of mana, and sent off a single handshake cycle.
“Ready,” he said, and triggered his own status again, sparking the contact.
The loop operated only in phase for a long moment, providing a precise scan of primes and φ as they crossed the band.
The lens didn’t glow; the air stayed still.
Orion stared at the trace, waiting, and for a long moment, there was only background noise.
Then the line dipped, a phase-pure reaction, and the same click he’d seen on his logs signaling the System’s response, now shifted by the new geometry that included him, but still easily recognizable.
His pulse surged with excitement, and the CC switched to automatic piloting, still well below its safety limit, but far beyond what he could handle himself. Even with his enhanced stats, he couldn't keep up with the rapid flow of data streaming past.
The room smelled faintly of iron for a while as the blood crystal worked harder than ever before.
He let the program run for a few more seconds, then cut it and watched the trace flatten. The lens recorded a small session token in memory, not much more than a phase relationship between the three elements.
However, that was enough, as now he could de-noise the class bands and traits even more effectively, and importantly, it signified that the System had given its consent.
He could not ask questions outside the established parameters, give commands, or pry into the deeper mechanics of the System, but all of that could wait for the future. For now, everything had gone exactly as planned.
He had his link.
Comments
Raymond Mouton
Thanks for the chapter. Good one.
