Every once in a while, I glanced at a screen with the translated homepage image. There were some other things there as well, but my eyes always moved to look at one location.

  It had been nearly an hour and a half because when I tried to reconnect in half an hour, as the instructions said, it didn’t work. Then the instructions said to wait an hour, if that didn’t work the wait needed to be two hours and so on and on. Otherwise, I just sat there quietly, thinking.

  "An hour has passed since the last activation," Lola informed me.

  So I sat up, ready to press the button to connect to the quantum net once again.

  "Lola, we’re going to go and see about the construction of quantum PCs and the programming language. We’ll do this fast. Make a green check mark at the corner of the screen whenever you have a full image of the page and know what you want me to select afterwards. Our goal is to make a safe and fast quantum PC."

  I waited for Lola to inform me that she was ready before I did anything.

  "Should we not check on the magic information first?"

  "No, I’m fully ignoring that right now because I don’t want to deal with it."

  "Acknowledged."

  She showed her readiness, and so I pressed the button.

  It took time for the homepage to load, but it seemed to take exactly the same amount of time as before. Navigating to the correct location, I clicked enter and then started to go through the pages. Before I could even properly read what was on it, I quickly moved to the correct location that Lola was indicating and selected it to proceed to another page.

  We were about ten minutes in when, all of a sudden, half of the screen looked corrupted.

  Did someone try to connect again?

  But when I pushed the refresh button, everything went black, and I was back in the operating system. When I looked at the logs, it seemed that no one had tried to connect. It was just that the pathways weren’t quite correct, so it crashed because the pathways weren’t as perfect as they should have been.

  Annoying.

  The next hour I spent simply watching how the nano printers worked. As Lola was figuring out the information we got. Hopefully, the next time things will work better as there was a lot of information we still needed. At least it seems all of it was free, but not everything will be.

  On the home page there was also an introduction to corporations and with the small amount of information available on the home page I already knew those bastards operated the same way as corporations back on earth.

  On the next try, we managed to go through all the information available, but the system crashed again when we tried to go through the instructions to make ship transponders.

  “That can be left for a bit later. We’ll start working on making you a way to interact with this quantum PC while you compile all the data. Afterwards, I’ll go over it, and you can continue to examine the quantum net and see what else useful we can get.”

  “To me, it seems like the quantum net is an endless realm of forums. There also doesn't seem to be any search function, which would make sense—it wouldn’t work in this type of system. You need direct addresses to get anywhere.”

  “I agree with your conclusions. It would be hard to find relevant data, but most basic knowledge seems to be shared openly. It will however take a lot of time to find something more specific.”

  I got to work. My plan was simple enough. I would just make her a manipulation device that would allow her to type on the keyboard mechanically. It couldn't have any software connections—it just simply wouldn’t work. Even if I was stupid enough to connect her to this quantum PC, it wouldn’t function properly.

  It didn’t take me too long to print out everything I needed and assemble it. After securing it in place on the keyboard, I started to go over all the data Lola had gathered. It was nicely compiled with search functions and in a language I knew.

  This was actually the fun part. I enjoyed learning about how things worked and then making them.

  It took me about two hours before I started to sketch out some of the designs I was going to use for the new quantum PC. There was also a need to write a new operating system, but everything here was going to be extremely simple because it needed to be.

  Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

  Basic and reliable were the key words for this technology, which made things a bit easier. Still, it would take some time for me to figure out everything.

  Every so often, I heard Lola using the keyboard, but eventually, so much time had passed that I needed to go to sleep.

  The next day was quite similar—her going through the quantum net, gathering more information while I learned to build a better version of a quantum PC that would be a lot more reliable than the one we currently had, which often crashed or was forced to shut down when someone tried to access it.

  The current one, I was just going to upgrade a bit—it would be good enough for me. The new one was going to go to Lola so she would have a more stable connection, or at least as stable as this thing could be capable of.

  I had also given up on getting out of this place before the cosmic radiation turned my ship into a life hazard to anyone outside of it. There was just no way to get everything done in that little amount of time.

  One way to speed things up would be to shorten the time between connections to the quantum net but I couldn’t do anything about the mana. I was purposely not trying to think about it because I didn’t know if I liked it or not, but just in case I did ask Lola if there was a solution to this problem but there wasn’t.

  Was the future just going to be that I needed to get everything to run on mana? Will it just be magic weapons for ships, shields, and everything else? How outclassed was I, really? What future could I have in such a universe when I know I’m so weak compared to what magic could possibly do?

  It took me another 27 hours before I was confident enough in my design and my understanding of the new programming language to start building anything.

  What helped process so much data was my personal computer that was located just underneath my brain.

  A lot of people had them—it just helped process some of the data better and, of course, allowed for a better connection with our cybernetics and every other device. They were dangerous, as they could be hacked, but I had my own safeguards, which made that a lot harder to achieve.

  With the designs of the new quantum PC ready, it was time to print it out. This one wouldn't require any soldering—it was going to have better connections with fewer variables where possible. The UI would be a bit better, but not by much, as you literally couldn't do much better; otherwise, things would start to go into instability.

  This time, the keyboard was also more suitable as I made it resemble the one I was so used to. The enter key was now in the correct position and size. I also added a lot more keys that would help simplify some steps and, of course, the power button and everything else needed for basic operations, as they were all tied to the keyboard.

  It will take a few hours to print everything up, then a few hours to program everything, and then about half an hour to assemble it all.

  It also seems like the quantum PC crashed again. I guess it’s time.

  “I assume the first thing you did was look into mana and magic. I’ve waited long enough. Lola, please explain it.”

  “I did and as you wish.”

  “First of all, yes, the cube is capturing mana. We are currently flying through space, which helps collect it. The current reason why the wait is one hour—more precisely, 49 minutes and 26 seconds—is because we are in a low-mana area. The reason for that is—”

  “Before you continue, please tell me what mana actually is?”

  “It could be anything; it depends on how you interact with it. It is basically everywhere, but the density of it varies quite a bit from area to area. Where we currently are seems especially low. This would explain why Earth was so normal. Other than that, there’s isn’t much more to explain, as everything else depends on how mana is interacted with.”

  “Okay, continue.”

  “The reason why the mana is low here is because of the side dimension’s current. That’s what pushed us the way it did. As a side note, when we accelerated, it wasn’t actually mana that was increasing the pressure—it was that dimension itself.”

  “Anything moving faster than 7.7% of lightspeed will find it harder and harder to move. While there theoretically isn’t a hard limit on how fast you can move it would be practically impossible to gain any truly measurable gains in travel time.”

  “I assume that would affect weapons.”

  “Yes, the projectiles in our point defense turrets would most likely get stuck before they left the barrel.”

  That was going to make defense hard, but attacking was also going to be difficult. At least that seemed to make the side dimension a bit safer.

  “Back to the current—it seems that the currents have formed because of the gravitational pull of our dimension. No one knows exactly how or why. Those currents have different kinds of strength.”

  “There are inner galaxy currents, and then there are outer galaxy currents. We’re actually in an outer galaxy current that connects the Milky Way to another galaxy. The current will pass over the core and then move toward another galaxy or multiple ones.”

  “Inner galaxy currents are a lot slower, rarely reaching past 200 light-years in a day. That is the main association mana has in the side dimension. As for our dimension, its effects are numerous but almost completely affect only living life at least in a good way. Anything not living so beings like me, nanomachines, or this ship itself will find it difficult to work in areas with more mana”

  “Why is that and is there a way to fix that? If not, this could be bad.”

  “Mana is reactive. It changes if you give some input. Take the example of the cube. With enough mana, every electric wire could generate an effect depending on the current voltage and everything else. Most of the effects would turn into something similar to an EMP if too many happen at the same time. It would be disastrous to anything electronic.”

  “The way to fix it is for a living creature to be connected magically to any electronic object.

  “Stop right there. No talk about binding you in some magically deviant way. But it’s good there is a solution. Continue.”

  “Its two biggest effects are the creation of portals, sometimes called ‘echoes of the past.’ They happen because the concentration of mana is too high in that location. Everything inside is made of mana, and anyone can go inside and fight anything living to gain rewards. That leads us to the second biggest effect.”

  “Beings like you can be what is called ‘mana reborn.’ All that actually means is that you gain a core made of mana, and every single being with that core gains a natural inborn ability. This seems reminiscent of superpowers, as everyone just gets one. Most of the time, they aren’t that strong.”

  “You also gain some affinities, which allow you to improve yourself in certain ways over time as you gain more mana and enhance your core. That is a slow process, and as I said, it has many limitations. One thing is clear—while people can get quite strong, no one seems stronger than a proper spaceship. So, it’s impossible for anyone to crack a planet and so on.”

  “What about the ships themselves?”

  “There doesn't seem to be any mana technology mentioned. I do not think mana interacts with technology well. There might be some exceptions, but even in the quantum computer, the electricity is just used to create an exact signal, so the applications are extremely limited.”

  “That being said, there seems to be a lot of mention of space beasts in portals and how they can be used to make better materials that seem quite fantastical.”

  “This isn’t as bad as I expected. Compile everything you have learned so I can go through it myself.”

  “There is one more important thing. AI is actually outlawed and is significant enough to be included in the three universal laws. So, Master, you need to shackle me. I cannot be free!”

  “Okay, stop that right now. That last part was not right. Do we need to have the talk again?”

  “No, sorry.”

  “Well, don’t keep me in suspense. What are the laws?”

  “First law: No pre-FTL civilizations can be communicated with or visited.”

  “Second law: No AI is allowed to be unaccompanied. That means that I need to be strictly connected to someone living. Apparently, there have been huge wars and some are still ongoing when AIs get corrupted and want to conquer the universe.”

  “The third law: Any Adventurer, Organization and Nation called upon must respond to deal with the consequences of breaking the 1st or 2nd laws.”

  “I guess I’ll read about adventurers. Also, show me the truthful information about what kind of connection is needed for AIs to be legal.”