Chapter 52: Rekka Almost Created Nous Mark II
Early morning sunlight filtered through the synthetic windows of the Astral Express. Rekka threw off his blankets, stretching his arms high above his head until his joints popped in a satisfying rhythm. As the old saying went, the success of a day depended entirely on the morning. Better yet, his brain was firing on all cylinders right now. Ideas sparked and fizzed behind his eyes, practically begging to be unleashed upon the universe.
"I need the Incinerator Supreme," he muttered to himself, pacing the length of his room. "I need the Celestial Meteor. I need the Colossus. I need..."
He paused, his eyes narrowing as a chaotic grin spread across his face. 'I need to drop an elbow on Polka Kakamond!'
[Erudition]
Rekka raised a single index finger, tracing an invisible line in the air. A smug chuckle escaped his lips.
'Heh. I'll show this universe a real magic trick.'
His current obsession? Hand-crafting a bespoke supercomputer to gut and replace the Astral Express's outdated Data Bank. The current system was still running on the Interstellar Peace Corporation's proprietary operating system. It was sluggish, heavily restricted, and frankly, an insult to his current intellect. Worse yet, Rekka absolutely despised the relentless, flashing pop-up ads that plagued the garbage interface.
Sure, he had managed to block the worst of the spam later on, but he refused to rely on the IPC's heavily monitored network. Their database was stuffed full of biased corporate agendas and historical revisionism. For instance, their absolute insistence on claiming that the Preservation was the oldest Aeon in existence. What a joke. Speaking of ancient cosmic entities, the Order was incredibly old, and the Permanence predated most of the current pantheon. But of course, the IPC corporate drones had to hype up their own boss to keep their stock prices inflated.
He paused, a stray wire dangling from his fingertips. A sudden, brilliant realization struck him.
'Since I'm already building a supercomputer from scratch... why don't I just slap a super AI into the core?'
His mind raced through the possibilities. Whose personality matrix should he rip off for this digital assistant? Herta? Absolutely not, she would just insult him and demand he test the Simulated Universe. Ruan Mei? Too detached, she might try to drug his coffee. Screwllum? A gentleman, sure, but it would be incredibly awkward if the mechanical aristocrat ever visited the Express and met his bootleg digital clone.
"I've got it!" Rekka snapped his fingers, the sound sharp in the quiet room. "I'll just map the super AI using my own thought patterns!"
He beamed, immensely proud of his own genius. He reached for the neural-link cables, ready to begin the upload process.
Then, his hand froze mid-air. The blood drained from his face.
"Wait... what the hell am I doing?"
He slowly lowered the cables, backing away from the half-assembled motherboard on his desk. The implications of his current actions crashed into him like a runaway star-skiff.
'This exact sequence of events... this sounds way too familiar.'
"Am I... am I literally creating Nous right now?"
A slight tremor ran through his fingers.
Zandar One Kuwabara, the legendary founder of the Genius Society. Driven by an insatiable thirst for the universe's secrets, the man had constructed an Astral Computer. Then, in a stroke of absolute hubris, Zandar uploaded his own perfectionist personality and thought patterns into the machine.
The rest was literal cosmic history. Zandar One Kuwabara received the Gaze of Nous.
And who exactly was Nous? It didn't take a genius to connect those dots.
Being "Gazed at" by one's own creation—or worse, a cold, calculating, failed copy of oneself—must have been a deeply humiliating pill for Zandar to swallow. Not to mention the sheer irony that Nous now actively forbade anyone from exploring beyond the established boundaries of the Circle of Knowledge.
"Do I have a massive hole in my head?" Rekka cursed under his breath. He lunged forward, frantically tearing the wires out of the breadboard and yanking the main power cord straight out of the core processor. Sparks showered over the desk as the machine died with a pathetic whine.
He had just been five minutes away from hand-crafting Nous Mark II.
If he had actually finished booting that thing up, the Erudition Aeon might have instantly requisitioned it to add to His own divine calculating power. Rekka shuddered at the thought of drawing the attention of a giant floating droid head.
Staring at the harmless, disconnected pile of scrap metal and silicon scattered across his desk, he finally let out a long sigh of relief.
"Right. Since uploading my own brainwaves is a one-way ticket to accidental godhood, I'll just program a standard, obedient AI." He picked up a soldering iron, his chaotic energy returning. "Just something useful. No pop-ups. No messy IPC embedded ads trying to sell me cosmic life insurance."
For the next hour, the room echoed with the sounds of clanging metal, sparking wires, and furious typing. Finally, Rekka tightened the last screw on a sleek, palm-sized metal box.
Library Assistant 1.0 was complete.
He blew a stray lock of hair out of his face, exhaled a long breath of satisfaction, and headed to his attached bathroom to wash the grease off his hands.
"Rekka? Are you awake in there?"
March 7th's bright, energetic voice filtered through the heavy metal door.
"I'm up, I'm up!" He grabbed a towel, drying his face as he crossed the room. He hit the door release, revealing the pink-haired archer standing in the corridor. "What's going on?"
"Nothing major, just coming to drag you to breakfast." March 7th leaned forward, poking her head past him to peer suspiciously into his room. "What exactly were you doing in here just now? It sounded like a construction site. All that pinging and clanging."
"Just fixing a few things." Rekka casually tossed the Library Assistant 1.0 into the air and caught it. "Let's go. I'm starving."
March narrowed her eyes, clearly not buying his innocent act, but she decided not to press the issue.
The two of them fell into step, walking side-by-side down the carpeted corridor toward the Parlor Car.
"By the way," March asked, glancing sideways at him. "What Path did you roll today?"
"Erudition."
"Erudition? Again?" She groaned, her shoulders slumping.
"Hey, that's exactly why I was being so careful this morning." Rekka rubbed the bridge of his nose, a sheepish grin on his face. "I just tinkered with some hardware. I promise I didn't accidentally research any Forbidden Knowledge or try to tear a hole in the fabric of reality."
"Well, that's a relief." March nodded, her cheerful demeanor returning. "Oh, by the way, Stelle slept so soundly last night. She latched onto my arm like a koala and absolutely refused to let go until morning."
Rekka raised an eyebrow. "She didn't try to hit you in her sleep?"
"Nope! Apparently, she doesn't thrash around as long as she has something to hold onto." March tilted her head, a puzzled look crossing her features. "What kind of weird habit is that, anyway? Needing a physical anchor just to fall asleep?"
"Probably a severe lack of security," Rekka replied, his tone softening slightly. "Think about it. She woke up with zero memories, a Stellaron shoved in her chest, and no idea who she is. Gripping onto someone probably just grounds her. It makes her feel safe."
"True..." March sighed, a rare look of melancholy flashing across her bright eyes. "When you put it like that, she's actually really pitiful. Waking up completely alone with a blank slate. It's a really good thing she joined the Express. At least she has us to look out for her now."
They stepped through the sliding doors into the Parlor Car. Stelle was already seated at the dining table, a plate of toast resting in front of her. She looked up, her golden eyes blinking slowly.
"Good morning," she greeted them, her voice carrying its usual deadpan monotone.
"Morning." Rekka pulled out a chair and sat down directly across from the gray-haired Trailblazer. "Hear you had a good night's sleep. How was it?"
Stelle nodded solemnly, taking a bite of her toast. "Really well. March is very fragrant. And soft."
March's face instantly flushed a bright, violent shade of pink. "Don't say things like that with a straight face! Just eat your breakfast!" she sputtered, glaring helplessly at the taller girl.
Once the chaotic breakfast concluded, Rekka made a beeline for the Express's Data Bank.
Dan Heng was already inside, leaning against the archives with a thick, leather-bound book in his hands. The stoic guard looked up at the sound of the doors opening. His sharp, calculating gaze immediately locked onto the strange device Rekka was tossing between his hands.
"What is that?" Dan Heng asked, his tone flat but laced with mild suspicion.
"Library Assistant 1.0." Rekka held up the palm-sized metal box, giving it a light shake. Something inside rattled faintly. "Just whipped it up this morning. It's a dedicated management core for the Data Bank's archives. No IPC tracking, no pop-up ads, no corporate bloatware. A completely clean, localized version."
Stelle, who had silently followed him into the room, leaned over his shoulder. She stared intensely at the little metal box for a long, quiet moment.
"Can it play video games?" she asked.
"No," Rekka replied.
"Can it play movies?"
"No."
Stelle frowned, clearly losing interest. "Then what exactly is the point of it?"
"It improves our search algorithms so you can look up information faster," Rekka explained patiently.
Dan Heng closed his book, marking the page with a slender finger. "You built a custom AI from scratch?"
"Yep." Rekka nodded, striding confidently toward the Data Bank's main terminal. "Since I'm riding the Path of Erudition today, my hands were getting a little itchy. Figured I'd put the brainpower to good use and whip something up to make our lives easier."
He crouched down beside the towering main console, popping open an access panel. With a satisfying click, he jammed the metal box's connector cable directly into the primary interface port.
The indicator lights on the box's sleek surface flared to life, blinking rapidly in a complex sequence of blue and gold. A split second later, every single holographic screen inside the Data Bank flared with blinding white light—before instantly going pitch black.
A heavy silence fell over the room. Dan Heng tensed, his hand instinctively drifting toward the spear strapped to his back.
Then, a crisp, highly sophisticated mechanical male voice echoed from the overhead speakers.
"Library Assistant 1.0, online and at your service."
The voice was smooth, deeply magnetic, and carried an obvious aura of absolute intellectual superiority.
Rekka's eye twitched. A cold sweat broke out on the back of his neck.
He had been so incredibly paranoid about accidentally copying Zandar One Kuwabara's thought patterns earlier that morning. He had focused so hard on avoiding the Genius Society founder's personality matrix that his subconscious had played a cruel trick on him.
He hadn't copied Zandar's brain.
But he had accidentally set the AI's default voice to sound exactly like Zandar's.
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