I never actively thought about the future. In this line of business, gazing too far ahead was only setting you up for a big disappointment. The present was all that mattered. But Couren’s words about what should come after Belmesion haunted me long after I'd left his office. What would I do if I weren’t a Cardinal Mage and human weapon, as a play of thought? What kind of future would I want for myself? What would I do for a living, if I could freely choose anything?

  Where would I go?

  I hadn't the faintest.

  But he'd made it sound like it wouldn't be the kind of future logic expected. Why?

  I thought he'd be the first to tell me not to dream about things that couldn't be.

  Either way, any mention of tomorrow meant nothing before I could solve the main roadblock on the way there, meaning the anti-magical shackles around my wrist. They were sort of difficult to forget about, especially every morning when putting on a shirt. Too bad, solutions to a mythical-grade puzzle weren’t available left and right. If it were so easy to work around dragons’ magic resistance, that student-level knowledge could solve it over a weekend, they wouldn’t have gone down in history as the kings of beasts. Those rare few braves who managed to earn the title of Dragonslayer were usually transcendent Swordmasters, not wizards.

  I looked into elective courses likely to give me helpful tips and tricks, but tempered my expectations.

  Alchemy felt like a clear choice, but what else? Monsterology? Herbology might not help with the rings directly, but it could improve my understanding of alchemy and make those classes more productive. Unfortunately, only a finite number of courses could fit into four years, and even one useless choice could hurt my efforts. We only needed to pick the courses for the first term, but the choices made now paved the road for content to follow.

  Most subjects were split into multiple parts and you couldn't apply for Course II without first completing Course I of the same series. For example, if I didn't pick Advanced Alchemy I right away, I'd almost certainly miss part VI in the final year. But was it going to be so useful that I'd have to take every course on it? Maybe it was a mistaken line of research to begin with, and investing there at all took me further away from the real answers.

  What a headache.

  The electives problem still occupied my thoughts later in the week. Lost in thought, I was on my way to the dorms from the Arcane department after lesssons, when an unexpected obstacle in the school's front yard made me look up.

  An obstacle to my eyes.

  It was Ms Asia, getting looks from passers-by while impatiently gazing around, as if looking for someone. She wore her lecturer’s robes less than respectfully, wrapped around the waist by the sleeves, only a white shirt under with the top buttons undone. The miniskirt with semi-opaque stockings and high heels emphasized her long, shapely legs. Her faculty ID card hung on a strap around her neck, dangling over the curve of her chest, as if intentionally drawing attention to her cleavage.

  I couldn’t exactly just pass her by, pretending I didn’t know her.

  But already before I could go ask what she was up to, she noticed me and skittered over. Though that woman never expressed herself very honestly and directly, an intense, almost desperate light glowed in her amethyst eyes, and she clutched my shoulders, as if afraid I'd fly away.

  “Hope,” she said. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  “Me?”

  “Are you busy right now? You’re not. You’re not, right?”

  “Ms Asia? Did something happen?”

  “Tut-tut.” She paused to wave a finger at me. “You must call me ‘Professor Ruthford’ here.”

  “You’re very serious about this commission, I see.”

  “I’m always serious about work. And, so? Are you free?”

  “If it’s an official request from a Professor to a student, how could I possibly say no?”

  “Oh. What’s with that heartless manner of speech? Are you sulking? Did you want me to say I came here just to see you? Well, that wouldn’t be a lie either. You’re the only one in the world who can help me right now. You wouldn’t abandon your dear aunt to the wolves, would you? Even after sharing your bed with me?”

  The wording! The wording! People are going to misunderstand!

  I sighed. “Really, what's the matter? Are you in trouble?”

  “Yes, I am in trouble,” she replied. “Though it's not so much a matter of something having happened, as it's that of nothing happening.”

  “Not sure if I follow.”

  “Well, simply explaining the situation normally, in order, wouldn’t be any fun. I’ll tell you the whole story after you promise to help me. Should you refuse, I’ll tickle you to death right here where the whole school can see. The choice is your own.”

  The professionalism only went ankle-deep.

  “I’m sorry to tell you,” I said, “but I’m not ticklish, and our state has a strict policy of 'no negotiation' in hostage situations.”

  “Uguu…”

  Ms Asia slumped her shoulders, pretending to cry like a baby.

  If this went on much longer, she’d embarrass herself, and me, and our house. Guess the terrorists won this one.

  “All right. I understand. I promise, I’ll do whatever I can. For now, why don't we go inside?”

  She wasted no time bouncing back up and smiled faintly like a portrait by a resurgence-era master of arts.

  “Thanks, Hope. I love you.”

  Give me a break.

  I followed in my aunt’s wake into the main house and upstairs and down the long hallways of mirror-clear floors into a classroom that had been assigned as the base for her new course.

  On a quick look, I would’ve thought it was a junkyard. All the chairs and tables had been haphazardly pushed to the sides to give way for a pyramid of cardboard boxes occupying much of the floor space. Some of the boxes had had their bowels emptied onto the desks by the wall. Strange, black-painted metal components of many sizes and shapes, and stacked loops of ridged, serpentine cables.

  Ms Asia didn’t tell me a word on the way, but now opened her verbal coffers readily.

  “As you can see, I’m still in the middle of setting things up here. The course won’t start until November, but there’s a lot of work still left to do. I was supposed to have an assistant teacher, but that person apparently bailed for one reason or another. The administration is presently looking for a replacement hire, but there’s no telling how long that's going to take. Not many people with the necessary skillset to be found in Calidea. I may have to train an assistant from scratch. Meanwhile, I’m stranded.”

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  “Sounds bad.”

  “It’s infernal. As you may gather, I’m the type to use my head, not my hands. Manual labor isn’t my forte. I can do it if I have to, but only a fool tries to do everything alone. So…”

  “So?” I echoed.

  Ms Asia pouted at me.

  “Are you even human? You know what I mean. You. Give me a hand. Is your name Hope, or what? We need to unpack the components and install all the devices.”

  I looked at the boxes. They were pretty big boxes and there were a lot of them.

  “I know next to nothing about magitech. I doubt I’ll become an engineer anyday soon. How could I help you when I can’t even tell what I’m supposed to do?”

  She didn’t seem to see a problem.

  “This is a school, isn’t it? I’ll teach and all you need to do is learn. Making these things may be terribly complicated, but assembling and using them is so easy, a monkey could do it. Here. Let me show you.”

  Ms Asia picked one box from the pile, checked the contents from the shipping form, and then pushed it across the smooth parquette to the teacher’s desk in front of the blackboard. She picked up a box cutter from the desk and performed a deft vivisection on the box along the taped line, and parted the topside. From among the dry hay used to pad the contents, she raised up a large object wrapped in brown paper, undid the wrappings, and set it to stand onto the table.

  It was the strangest thing. A rectangular case of black-painted steel with rounded edges. Through the open, slanted top side grew a jungle of small, metal-legged mushrooms with flat disc caps.

  “Typewriter,” Ms Asia named the gadget. She returned to scooping the box, then to take out a heavy, ambiguously phallic object with a thick lens embedded on the sharp-cut tip. “Projector.”

  She went on to retrieve another, larger box, and soon called for a hand. Together we extracted a heavy, metal-framed case about three feet long, just as tall, and maybe a foot wide.

  “Central unit.”

  “Ms. Asia,” I had to speak up there. “Did you really need my help with something, or did you just want to overwhelm me with manmade horrors beyond comprehension?”

  “Professor Ruthford~!”

  “Yes, yes, Professor.”

  “My, you’re more old-fashioned than I imagined. I thought you’d be into this sort of thing. Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of the computer before? It’s already almost thirty years old, too, as an invention.”

  “This is a ‘computer’…?”

  There was a computer in the RA’s Lufield base too. I went to see it once. It was an enormous, cubic monster of blinking lights and buttons, whirring and humming, and took up a room twice as large as this class.

  Two Tier 4 mages were needed to feed the machine mana nonstop to keep it operational. One would inject a talisman with magically encoded math problems into the device and in a while the metal beast would print out a long strip containing the solutions and the steps taken to reach them. I suppose it was a little faster than trying to calculate the same by hand, but was it really worth all the trouble? I couldn’t see what use ordinary people could have for such a thing.

  Ms Asia’s computer, however, was less than 1/50 of the size of the RA’s model. Small enough to not look out of place next to your work desk.

  Aschtelt’s technology truly was on a different level from the rest of the world. But could a computer this small solve even half as many problems as the big one?

  The engineer plugged the projector into the socket on the backside of the typewriter, then went to retrieve some cables and hooked up the gadget to the central unit. She unlocked the side panel of the big metal case and gestured at me to come closer.

  “Here are a few things you should know,” she said. “Normally, there’s no need for the user to touch any of the interior or know what goes on here. Except for these parts. Here in the back is the storage holder. It’s for these.”

  Ms Asia showed me a block of bluish crystal about the size of a small book, and then stuck it into the holder deep in the dark maw of the machine. There were altogether four slots, and she proceeded to fill them all with identical slates.

  “This is the computer’s memory,” she said. “All the work done on the device is stored on these crystal drives. Their capacity is finite, so they will need to be eventually replaced.”

  “I see. How much information can they hold?”

  “About 800 novels’ worth in plain text. Or four hundred million characters. Not that much. The crystals with more space are more expensive too. The academy board was pretty cautious with their investment.”

  A small library’s worth of books, in that small block of rock? That sounded...magical.

  “The most important thing is this,” Ms Asia continued and raised a glass vial a bit longer than a finger, full of yellow-glowing substance, the ends blocked with thick metal caps. “Processed nethercite in starktree oil. Don’t break it, okay, if you need to handle some. The stuff inside is the same they use in auto batteries. It will give you bad burns if you get any on your skin. Human mages cannot use nethercite in this form, but the machine can. It’s the computer’s power supply unit. And it goes right here.”

  She nudged off and removed a thick aluminum fan attached to the side corner of the case, stuck the glowing vial into the cavity behind the fan, put the fan back in its place, and then closed the case.

  “There,” she said and turned back to me, pretending to wipe nonexistent sweat off her brow. “Phew. We’re done installing our first desktop workstation. Bravo. Applause, applause.”

  I smiled at her childishness and clapped my palms together to humor her.

  “And what happens then?”

  “The real magic comes next.”

  Ms Asia grabbed a switch on top of the central unit and turned it from back to front. There was a faint click and a hum as power surged in the machine's depths. She went and flipped a smaller switch on the project on the table, and the lens of it lit to an azure glow. A faint blue rectangle of light popped up to hover in the air above the projector. Ms Asia took a seat facing the semicircle of small keys sticking up from the typewriter, but instead of pressing any, she laid her hand on the small, stubby stick fixed in the very middle.

  “This is the navigator,” she said and tilted it forward. A series of grainy white letters made up of small circles sprung up onto the canvas of light.

  SYSTEM - DIRECTORY - WRITER - CALCULATOR

  “The visual interface lets even non-magicians read what’s stored on the crystals. The controller is used to navigate the interface to access premade program tools, called applications. You can ignore the first two. The school is most interested in the writer, so let’s see that for now.”

  I watched Ms Asia shift the stick twice right and then down. The words vanished, replaced by a thin frame with UNTITLED spelled on top. She now moved both of her hands to the keys and began to press them with a fluid, quick rhythm, like a pianist.

  “‘My name is Professor Ruthford’…” she typed out and the words appeared onto the frame in real time. “There. The line you see spelled on the display window is now stored in the crystal drive I showed you. We can close the device, leave and come back later, even a hundred years later, and the text will still be there, accessible anytime by those with the necessary tools and knowledge, but hidden to any other. Amazing, isn’t it?”

  “Sure it is,” I agreed.

  “Well, this computer will have a new owner soon. So leaving my name stored there would be embarrassing. But that’s fine. We can freely edit the contents. Backspace, backspace…”

  She hammered one larger key repeatedly and the lines she had written vanished. Done, she turned back to me.

  “You’re now an expert in computer sciences, Hope. Congratulations. How does it feel?”

  “You were right,” I said. “It really is a system even a monkey could use.”

  Ms Asia pouted and leaned closer to poke my nose.

  “Are you messing with me now, young lady?”

  “Was that not the goal of the system?”

  “You are so not cute. Well? Since it’s that simple, do you think you can do it on your own next time?”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. The academy bought five computers for their own use and we need to install them. One in the prefect office, one in the faculty office, one in the main library, one in the side library, and one in the vice principal’s office...The deadline is today, the courier brought them an hour ago, and I have no assistant. If the contract is breached, the academy could demand a discount, or even back out of the deal. Which means, I won’t get my bonus. We’re the only ones who can do this and I want to have a few hours to sleep tonight. Help me, pleaaase…!”

  “Alright, I understand. Can you stop shaking me?”