Delays

The Machine is now gaining everyone's personal information and doing an identikit with their habits and attitudes. I also added just another function from the original machine.

When a person is identified by cameras or other visual means, apart from a colored square that tells if the interest is relevant or not, it also displays their alignment.

It was basically a totally worthless function, but it was cool so I made it.

So, now the Machine is growing himself with the info it can obtain... apart from me adding or modifying its code.

And in a few days, I saw a blunder I made.

In the original story, the Machine is connected to all the world's electronic devices within a few days after it was launched (or so I remember).

I also thought I could do the same. 

Here, I made a mistake. The Machine was launched and it should enter all the electronic devices, but there's a slight problem.

You see, the way it does expand its influence is by two means, via the Internet and via electrical current.

The former is a REALLY slow process, hundreds of times slower than the latter.

But even the latter has a problem. A problem I couldn't have known before.

You see, we are in Siberia and there aren't many places that are using the same electrical current. Most of the time, people use generators to power themselves up.

That's why I came to this city. In my old place, I didn't have either Internet or electrical current, so I came here.

But now I discovered something else.

The electric system isn't connected to much else.

Siberia has an electric system running around its major cities but it's closed off from the rest of the world.

That's why now I'm developing another way.

What I want to do is to make the Machine spread like a virus, by spreading itself from another source other than my own computer.

But, I have to limit some way. While now the Machine is, or should be, invisible to any normal software, adding something like that is worsening the situation.

That's why I'm making sure to make the code spread only from the less powerful computers.

The reason is simple, there's no way an advanced organization like Schicksal or Anti-Entropy is using Windows 2000 while there's Windows 11 right now.

It will slow its spread, but after the start, it will grow exponentially.

It will take a month, or maybe a few if there are different operative systems in this world.

[Programmer] is a skill that doesn't give me direct knowledge about programming and the knowledge I have is limited to the three books I have about it. 

And they should be old as well. Better buy more, it will help me find more growth room for the Machine.

Anyway, there's a lot of work right now, and time is tickling.

---

Three weeks passed, and I ran toward my first problem.

And it wasn't a programming problem either, it was a real-world one.

Just yesterday, the police came to see this storeroom and I panicked.

It's not illegal to own many computers, but it could expose me as the Machine's creator if a report was made.

So, I made the conscious decision to store all my PC's in my [Inventory].

The good point is that the inspection didn't create any problems for me.

The bad point is that the diffusion progress went back to zero, and I had to remake everything.

I'm just lucky that I have the code I was writing the same as it was before as it is in my normal PC on my desk.

I also discovered that if I disconnect all the PCs that the Machine uses it won't just stop working. It will just freeze its information gathering until the PCs are reconnected.

There's not any bug or glitch with that so that's good.

Now I just have to complete that damned code, then I'll go out to level up.

I have no problem with my current skill, no, it's safe to say my skills are way better than anyone my age...

Normal people my age, I don't know how 'normal' a kid with a fully developed stigmata is...

Anyway, it's another month before returning to the grind.