Magic is Programming

Carlos groaned as the brightness of sunlight seeping through his tent's fabric finally woke him. Ugh. It's definitely way past dawn, but I still feel tired. Even with parallel minds, finishing all 8 new soul structures took until… past midnight, I'm pretty sure? He rubbed at his eyes, then yawned and stretched. Absorption's been going full bore all night, aaand… wow, still not quite done. The big superstructure is still at Level 15, working its way up. Needing 10 times as much essence is a huge slowdown for that thing's advancement. That's probably our new big bottleneck, really, now that we can make new normal structures 3 or 4 at a time.

He thought back to the previous night's concurrent activities and laughed quietly to himself. What an odd mix of strangeness and normality. I remember meditating exclusively on the concept of a storage space for mental contexts for hours, and I also remember spending the exact same period of time meditating exclusively on the concept of quickly and smoothly switching mental contexts as needed, whether swapping the current context with a stored one, or saving the current context and starting a new one. And at the same time, also meditating, once again with exclusive focus, on the concept of managing and controlling my mental focus.

And if I think about it, hmm… Carlos started a second mind running and paid attention to his memories of the immediate past. I wonder how it feels when I focus on that multi-memory thing while it's happening. Aha! I remember thinking "How will this thought come across?" just now, when it definitely was not part of my - or rather, this mind's - active mental context. It's a memory, my memory, that I'm aware of and know about, but it doesn't inherently involve this mind's current focus of attention. He dropped back down to one mind, because he had no particular need for an extra mind at the moment. His two minds didn't exactly merge, because there was no need for any kind of merging; the memories were all already merged, and both minds were Carlos. Carlos simply chose, as himself, to stop thinking of two things at once.

Carlos sat up and called out quietly toward the privacy divider that split the tent in two. "Amber? Are you awake?"

"Hmm? Oh, you're finally up!" Some rustling sounded from her side of the tent, then the dividing curtain retracted into the tent's ceiling, pulled up by a minor enchantment.

Carlos yelped and instinctively pulled his sheet up to cover himself. "Hey! I'm not dressed yet!"

Amber blushed and hastily triggered the divider to unfurl back into place. "Sorry. I thought you were ready to talk."

"Since when does talking require getting dressed first? Never mind, just remember for next time."

Amber mumbled something that might have included "next time," but was too quiet to make out clearly, then raised her voice again. "Okay. What do you want to talk about?"