Aron had advantages that made all of the problems the early pioneers of runic computing encountered complete nonissues. He was the perfect, or perhaps worst, person to have ever gotten their hands on that technology; it only depended on whether you were friends or foes in his eyes.For the mana requirements, he had an adapter that would convert electricity into mana, even if the ratio was steep. For material needs, he had atomic printers. And for the issues the original creators had run into regarding mass production of runic computers, he’d upgraded his atomic printers with the capability of printing runic constructs. All he would have to do is gather up the pre-printed materials and channel his mana into them for a while.And even that would cease to be a problem as soon as he worked out a way of automating the process of imprinting intent into runic constructs that were created by his atomic printers.Aron laughed out loud after he finished explaining his plans. He was quite excite

Aron, still giddy with excitement, ran to his seat at lightning speed. He couldn't wait any longer to test the computer and see if it met the standards outlined in the knowledge he had purchased from the system. He plugged it in and powered it on, allowing the computer to draw electricity from the wall through its power brick, which converted it to mana to power the components, thus completing the bootup processes.The operating system he had written into it came to life, lighting up the screen with the GAIA Technologies logo, something he was careful to never leave out of his innovations.“Let’s see how it holds up,” he said as he pulled up the benchmarking program he had written alongside the runic OS.But after fiddling with the program for a while, he was left less than impressed by the runic computer’s speed of operations. It was fine for single operations, but didn’t even include the ability to hyperthread to at least emulate the ability to multitask. Perhaps starting with quant

“Babe,” the man said with a choked sob. “I know you’d rather die than become an impy. I know what happened to your family in the war... but I can’t do this by myself. I need you.” He clenched her blanket in his fists, then used it to wipe his tears. On some level, he knew it could cause more problems, but a man drowning in an ocean of tears wouldn’t fear the rain.“It isn’t just me, either. Our son, our son!” He sniffled back the snot that was about to drip out of his nose. “I can’t do it alone! You need to live, not just for me, but for our son. He needs a mother, not a stepmother or a nanny. And you promised me forever!“What happened, happened, but you can’t punish our son for the mistakes of others. Your pride is punishing us, and for what? What did we ever do? Is it fair to punish us just so you can keep your pride? Is it fair to make us feel the pain of losing you? The people you’re angry at don’t even know who you are! You’re just a number to them... but you’re everything to us

As Murphy said, anything that can go wrong, will go wrong, and at the worst possible time. Just hours after Aron received his weekly briefing about the increasing crime rate, an event that would change his stance on the remnants began.Former Somalia.Sahro Hassan was sitting on a bench on the side of a street in Mogadishu, overlooking the ocean. The street itself was very clean, considering how much conflict the nation’s capital had gone through. It had been through wars between warlords, pirate groups, terrorist attacks, and riots, all within the young man’s memory.But now, all the traces of destruction had faded and the city was, on the surface at least, at peace.“Those were the good old days,” he sighed, reminiscing on his early life. He had lived like a prince in Somalia’s troubled times, as his father was not only a warlord himself, but also a high-ranking member of the terrorist group Al-Shabaab. Those early years had shaped his personality, fostering an extremist interpreta

The yeet pod fell through the atmosphere, its pitch black radar-absorbent paint contrasting against the fireball created by reentry. It was perfectly targeted at the center of the active fire, and if one were to look from above, it would look like it was flying directly into the Sun.Soon, it smashed into the fire and disappeared from sight. The eerily silent blaze showed no changes, nor was there any sound of impact. But the yeet pod didn’t care about any of that and the machine contained within immediately got to work.The emergency workers watched as a pale, milky-white dome spread until it covered the entire area that was on fire. Then the flames began retreating, slowly at first, then faster and faster until it neared the center. The blaze, however, began fighting back at that point, wavering between invisibility and solidity as the dome starved it of mana.About five minutes later, the blaze lost its final fight. It’d drained all of the mana captured in the dome to fuel itself,