Chapter 32
Advanced (Actually Primitive) Magical Technology
After the still-distant possibility of storing and preserving Alexander's most useful memories had been raised as a goal to strive towards, Mary and her virtual doppelganger had proceeded to spend what many would probably consider far too much time identifying which of his memories they would like to focus on preserving and retrieving above all others.
The discussion between the two quickly spiralled out of control; it had initially started as a reminiscence about the virtues of their old life, focusing on Alexander's education, but soon shifted to a topic much closer to their hearts: his family. Both of them had immediately agreed that Alexander's mother had been far superior to what Mary had thus far experienced with the Midgard family.
After the depressing reality of what had happened to their new mother was once brought to the fore, they had rushed to move away from family moments to once again discussing the information that could be used in their exploration of magic.
This meant that they had begun to identify which of the ideas and concepts they had inherited from Earth could be used to create powerful and useful runes, in pursuit of the ultimate goal they had again reminded themselves of – freedom from this world's archaic and seemingly evil institutions.
It did not, however, remain an entirely verbal discussion for long; in the end Mary had inherited the nature of Alexander, someone who had, for many years of his life, access to cyberware that allowed him to essentially write down his thoughts and plans in real time.
After a lifetime, note-taking had become an almost unconscious habit for Alexander and, thus, for Mary; for Alexander, this habit had usually proved to be useful. And so, following in his footsteps, Mary and her virtual clone had begun the comparatively more tedious process of physically writing down a list of Alexander's most important, most preservable memories.
At first, they had made the obvious decision to focus on the educational material that Alexander had learnt over the course of his life, some of which was, by the standards of Earth, very basic. After quickly agreeing that essentially all of the teaching material that Alexander had been taught would ideally be duplicated for their library, they moved on to the final years of his life.
In the last years of his life, Alexander had successfully joined an advanced scholarship program that was supposed to teach the global specialists in the fields of biology and genetics. As such, he had dedicated countless hours to reading ahead and studying anything that could potentially assist him in maintaining his scholarship and graduating with honours.
This means that hidden within their memoires is a large amount of cutting-edge research, especially in the form of genuine research documents and articles, even by the standards set for the technologically sophisticated universities of Earth.
Unfortunately, without access to Alexander's cyber implants, Mary did not have a truly perfect memory as Alexander did, nor could she call upon the global and university networks. Which was why, Mary had noted, they absolutely needed to create a memory retrieval spell, something that could pull information from Alexander’s memories, even the things that he had forgotten or ignored but had nonetheless seen.
All of this information was categorised and noted, and as the pair of them reached the end of their note-taking episode, Mary's second mind brought up an issue that she had been considering and had decided that now was the time to bring attention to it.
How was the library supposed to be organised?
It had been a strange sight; Mary and her second mind were ultimately the same person, and yet, they had spent several minutes arguing over the necessity of planning so far in advance.
The second mind had insisted that they should write down a transitional plan on how to organise the current library and how it would evolve into what would, for now, be considered its final form.
Mary had temporarily disagreed; one part of her, the impatient child, wished to move on to creating the necessary spells, while the other part, which was still mostly Alexander in nature and inclination, wanted to ensure that everything was properly ordered before progressing further.
Ultimately, due to their matching natures, the second mind had won, and more paper was dedicated to the cause of arranging the currently small library properly.
In the end, Mary chose a temporary system for the current library room, splitting the bookshelves between the three walls, with each wall being dedicated to a particular source.
In this case, this meant that one wall would be dedicated to knowledge of the physical world, subjects such as physics and chemistry, exemplified by the books that would be created from Alexander’s memories, who, while an expert in biology, nonetheless knew far more than what Terra should be capable of offering.
This Mary felt was a certain thing; Sylvia had even told them as much once: that Earth was known for being more advanced in regular non-magical sciences than Terra. As such, one of the walls would be the wall of Earth sciences.
Both Marys were relatively certain that this was not a section that would be expanded much after the original development, at least not easily, not without a great deal of effort and study; after all, Alexander only had so many memories, and it was unlikely that they would learn anything new after completing the extraction of all of those.
It would follow, they had decided, that the next section would be for the magical world, starting with duplicates of their mother Elizabeth's books on magic theory. This section too would be difficult to grow after scanning all of the books that Elizabeth had stored away.
While they had no doubt that there would be some form of royal library in the palace of Midgard, its status is completely unknown to them at this time, and while in theory Mary, as a princess, should have access to it, in reality, it seems likely that the people of this world, at least those who support the current status quo, will do everything in their power to stop Mary from obtaining additional learning resources.
The final section of their library, at least for now, would be dedicated to their own magic spells and knowledge: the knowledge of her, Mary Midgard. Essentially, this section would serve as the storage area for their grimoires.
At the current time, this would be a matter of moving the furniture a bit and perhaps putting up some section labels.
But, the second mind had argued, eventually they would improve their library rune, and there is, of course, the matter of the spell formula used; that is something that they would be changing relatively soon too. As such, the size would likely increase even before the rune was improved further, and when that time came, they might be able to add floors to the library.
If they could add floors to their library, then each section could be moved to its own floor, providing a more distinct separation between the distinct sources of knowledge available to them.
The ground floor, which Alexander would have called the first floor, would serve as a space dedicated to their knowledge of spellcraft and to information they might need immediate access to. Eventually, they would pursue some means of instantly accessing the contents of the library so that they could actively use spells saved within, rather than having to remember and utilise the spell formulas themselves.
This, of course, was something that the second mind would be able to handle in the interim, but as the size of the library increased and the number of spell variants along with it, the more difficult it would be to quickly utilise specialised spells in complex situations.
The second floor would then have the magical theory of the world at large, starting with the books recovered from Elizabeth's own efforts. Eventually, Mary would add her observations of the nature of mana and magic to such a section, at least in the case of information that was not directly needed for active spell craft.
And finally, the third floor would be dedicated to Alexander and his memories of Earth.
As their available information and knowledge increased, they would also likely carve out specialised bookshelves, separated into categories of topics and their level of complexity or importance; perhaps in time they would dedicate entire floor sections; it would depend on how much external knowledge they could get their hands on.
As the pair conclusively finished writing their notes on their future plans, they once again felt a compulsion to bind the massive stack of papers they had created in a tome of knowledge.
Curious at what the result would be, they both proceeded, and soon enough Mary was gazing in confused wonder at what had become of her notes.
The result, as it turned out, was not one tome, but two.
A Compendium of Categorised Memories: Alexander Edition.
How to Organise a Virtual Library: By Mary Midgard.
There had been a moment of confusion as they had finished binding the papers; this was because the book that had just been created had briefly blurred, almost as if it were phasing out of reality, before splitting into the two tomes that were now before her.
With some degree of hesitance, Mary had reached out to the compendium first, intent on seeing what changes, if any, had been made; the first thing that she had noticed upon picking it up was that it was a shockingly heavy tome. That shock only became worse as she read through it; she was quickly overtaken by total surprise.
She distinctly recalled that book, which the library had generated from a single sheet of paper; its contents had been unchanged by the transformation from a singular sheet of paper into a real book. As such, it was a mostly empty tome, except for what had been written on that original sheet, which, in that case, was the rune and mathematical formula for a basic fireball spell.
The contents of this new book, however, could not have been more different from what they had originally written in the stacks of paper that they had the audacity to call a list.
The original notes had been organised to the best of their ability, but Mary was not accustomed to writing on physical paper, nor was she familiar with the inability to delete mistakes without consequences.
As a result, the notes had been something of a mess, filled with parts scratched out and information missing due to faulty memory.
This new compendium, however, had somehow erased all these mistakes.
Even more baffling is the fact that both participants swore that information within had not been placed by them; they eventually realised dates and names had been corrected. Both of them knew that the library had somehow divined Alexander's memories to accurately inscribe every detail they had written.
As they finished reading what they now knew was a library-updated compendium, they turned their attention towards the second completely new book that the library had seemingly created ex nihilo.
Mary eagerly grabbed the book and began reading it, but both she and her second mind were once again overtaken by a certain feature of the library; a sort of mania took hold of them.
During this bout of mania, they ended up discovering several new things about the hidden features of the library spell that they had so recently created, the most important of which was the fact that it would happily follow the desires of the current holder of the spell, which in this case meant that Mary's second mind could direct the library to rearrange and organise itself however she pleased.
A short time later, the mania faded.
Mary and her virtual counterpart looked upon what was now their library’s new arrangement, partly in self-congratulatory appreciation and partly in dismay at once again being controlled by their magic.
When they had originally begun to discuss the arrangement of the still small library's floor plan, they had concentrated not on the library that currently is but on that which could be upgraded quickly via the creation of a new, higher-power rune.
They had instead looked towards the future, a hopefully bright one, where the space that their library spell created was much larger than it currently was and could be more deliberately arranged.
In the short term, their intent had been to split the original floor that the spell had created, which is now the ground floor, into three roughly equal parts; each of these parts would contain an equal number of shelves to store what would hopefully be their ever-increasing number of books.
In practice, due to the incredibly small size of the room, this would have meant each wall would be a designated section.
Conveniently, although the room was sized like a walk-in pantry, it was also square-shaped instead of rectangular, meaning that each wall was equal in length. This meant that they could have sectioned off each wall and left the centre for the writing implements.
This plan, ultimately, the pair of them had agreed between themselves, was not only extremely optimistic, as they had not yet created a working spell to copy Elizabeth's books into their mind space, let alone a spell to create books from Alexander's own memories, but it was also actively wasteful.
Such a notion was wasteful because, at the current time, they had very little in the way of personal runes and spells; as such, it would likely take years to fill even a single bookshelf with tomes similar to the book of basic fire magic that they had recently created.
All of which had just been rendered moot with this latest bout of library-approved mania.
The results created a moderately bizarre scene; the ground floor remained the same size as the original walk-in pantry. Little had truly changed about the original floor other than the decrease in the number of shelves available. What was different about the building and was incredibly strange to look at was not one but two floors visibly hanging above it.
The process of watching the structural changes happen, even while controlled by the mania of the library, had been almost mind-breaking for both of them; the walls and ceiling, things that absolutely don’t simply change, not even in old Earth's virtual realities, had stretched in a way that structures are simply not supposed to be stretched, and Earth's wisdom had revealed itself, as both of them had been rendered speechless as their minds failed to properly compute what they were witnessing.
As their brains struggled to reboot from the self-inflicted injury, the furniture flew under its own power to its newly designated spots, following what should have been a theoretical plan for a much larger library, a library that would have been the result of a more powerful rune.
After Mary and her virtual doppelganger had recovered, not just from being controlled again but from the eldritch sight of walls bending and morphing under their own power, they had taken stock of the room’s new arrangement, and for a brief moment the two of them had thought that they had found a way to perpetually increase the size of the library without increasing the mana cost of maintaining it.
But they were quickly disabused of this notion when they had noticed that while the number of floors had indeed increased to three, the number of bookshelves shared between these floors was still exactly the same as it had been before.
As such, they were confronted with the strange sight of each floor, which was sized to comfortably contain twelve shelves instead of containing only four, the dozen that had previously existed in the library having been split equally between them as their advanced plans had directed.
In the centre of the small room was not only the writing table but also what turned out to be a redundant ladder to get to the floors above.
What should have been a vitally important ladder, or more ideally a stairwell to go with the classical library aesthetic, was instead rendered irrelevant when the mania that had controlled the second mind had inadvertently proved that in this mental space neither of them actually needed to stand on the floor; they could instead float around if they pleased.