“Systemmy, did I ever tell you that I love you?” I jokingly confessed my feelings.

Yep, I’ve assigned her a gender. One of the quirks of Russian language was the specific gendering of every noun. To a Russian speaker a door is immediately perceived as feminine [she], while a table is seen as masculine [he] and a wheel is an [it]. Grammatical gendering like that existed in a bunch of Indo-European languages, including French, Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, German and many, if not all, Slavic languages.

“You’re making me a far smarter man than I’ve ever been!” I sprinkled further compliments at 'her'. "I don't know what I did to deserve such generosity!"

She didn’t respond, as per her usual. I was fine with this sort of relationship - I loved obedient computer algorithms. In fact, the dumber they were, the easier it was to find out what made them tick.

The improved, multi-level, fractal version of [Identify-Visualize-Magnify LV 13] was glorious. I learned to wield my spell like a microscope, focusing it inward on myself. As a virologist I knew what things looked like at a million-power magnification and this knowledge had allowed me to easily direct it deeper into myself.

I gave this improved spell a new name - [The Infoscope]. It was a reference to the work of Vladimir K. Zworykin, the Russian-American inventor of the iconoscope. Dr. Zworykin's iconoscope was an early electronic camera tube used to scan an image for the transmission of television. It had laid the foundation for the Electron microscope that used a beam of accelerated electrons as a source of illumination.

My Infoscope was now nearly as complex as the ESEM Electron microscope. Esmy was one of my favorite tools in the Bioweapons laboratory. It was a depressing fact that Soviet microscopy science had unfortunately fallen far behind the west, so we had to order Esmy from East Berlin contacts in 1988. Thanks to her, I saw the alien beauty of viruses with my own eyes.

The most fascinating fact about Viruses was that many Soviet scientists did not consider them living things. Viruses are basically microscopic machines - complicated assemblies of molecules, proteins, nucleic acids, lipids, and carbohydrates.

Viruses do not consume any form of nourishment or expel waste, they do not grow and they cannot reproduce independently. Max Delbrück, German–American biophysicist, described the basic "life cycle" of a virus in 1937: rather than "growing", a virus particle is assembled from its constituent pieces in one step.

When a virus encounters a living cell, it attaches to it and injects its own DNA or RNA. The cell copies the viral data which makes more of the virus. These reproduced viruses now break out of the host cell, often destroying it in the process and infecting nearby cells. Rinse and repeat, until there are no more cells to inject.

All of these steps are predefined by the nature of the molecules that comprise the virus. Viruses don’t choose, respond, employ, evade or exploit - they follow a very specific program akin to a computer command. For all of their danger, RNA viruses are completely at the mercy of their environment and anyone willing to modify them.

Likewise, the original [Identify] spell was made of mana currents moving in a very specific way and it was now completely at the mercy of my modifications. I had torn it apart bit by bit, building atop its base foundation, adding new things to it with every iteration until it satisfied my needs and became my Infoscope.

I metaphorically pierced my flesh with the Infoscope and dove into myself. I identified my skin cells, veins and organs. I mathematically and visually perceived rivers of blood cells rushing down my veins. I witnessed the furnace of life within myself as my cells divided and increased in number. I traced the lines of my forming nervous system and identified my growing bones. I learned the Omnicode names for each of my developing organs.

The more I identified, the deeper I could go and because my growing body was constantly growing new cells, the observation and identification of them all was providing me with plentiful experience.

I peered through the cellular membrane witnessing mitochondria and ribosomes. I examined each cell nucleus in great detail, noting the location of chromosomes. The average grown human body has approximately 724 trillion cells. As a foetus I still had a long way to go, but nevertheless I had more than enough cells to observe in their splendor of continuous growth and replication.

When I was a teenager and the great war was coming to its inevitable end, I could walk to the V. I. Lenin State Library without the fear of being pulverized by a German bomb. There, beneath shining lanterns, sitting at a green desk, day by day, I studied the great accomplishments of Soviet engineers. Gargantuan hydroelectric dams that were being built across our super-nation, the Moscow Canal, Magnitogorsk, the Baltic White Sea Canal. Moscow itself was changing around me, buildings were being relocated, avenues were widened and the Seven Sisters skyscrapers were rising into the sky. I kept that feeling of being able to accomplish anything in my heart since those happy teenage days.

Magic was incredible! It allowed me to do the impossible, to bend the laws of the universe at will, to create things the access to which I didn't even have. I could observe cells without the bulky and ridiculously expensive and finicky electron microscope! Potentially limitless possibilities of the future were being unlocked to me.

What did I learn from leveling up? The formula for experience was [level + 1]^2 x [50]. The formula for Investiture points was [level] x [5]. With every evolution it would be harder to reach the next level, unless the formula changed. Going from something like Level 999 to Level 1000 would require 50 million experience points!

I spent the following weeks memorizing more levels of the info-fractals for Identify and Modify. It shot my [Infoscope] to Level 17.

I was pretty sure now that I had found a way to cheat the system. Nearly frying my soul-brain to memorize spell formulas was definitely worth it.

I pointed the Infoscope at itself once again, identifying it visually. It appeared in my mind as a ghostly construct akin to a fractal with many tentacles. Each of the tentacles broke into smaller lines that shimmered with even smaller lines of Omnicode and those lines broke down into even smaller lines of data. It was truly beautiful! I spun it about, feeling proud of what I had created.

The spell definitely looked akin to a coronavirus now, but with longer and more uneven threads, that were able to unfold outward.It worked in the following manner - the threads could extend outward and identify stuff by touching it and when they came back to the core, the Identify spell processed information about whatever it was scanning and sent it back to me via the channel that tied it to my soul.

I pondered how I could improve the design of the Infoscope. Could I point it at my own thoughts? What were my thoughts? Did they already echo inside Blankie’s organic brain as actual neural patterns?

I started to mess with Omnicode to make the Infoscope perceive my brain activity.

It took me quite a long time to arrive at the necessary code fractal, but after weeks of trial and error I was able to point the Infoscope at specific parts of my own brain. I saw that it was indeed expressing, echoing my thoughts as neural patterns. Using this data, I attempted to point the Infoscope at concepts, words and ideas, learning how various Omnicode patterns represented them. Months flew by as I tried to understand my own brain and studied the language of the System concept by concept.Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

The relentless mental labor showered me with XP and pushed me towards the next level. I initiated the level up.

. . .

[New skill slot gained!]