Once again, my night was spent in emotionally-dampened meditation. It made it easy to recollect myself and figure out what probably needed to be done without as many of the worries and aversions I’d face while fully conscious. However, emotions are very important parts of decision making, so the important choices about if I’m going to condemn myself to rooting out demon infiltrators would have to wait.

In the meantime, all my resources were spun up to try and make a sizable chunk of progress towards my current goal of relearning all my magical computer tricks. So far, I had a very functional- if plain- suite of tools to bypass encryption, passwords, and hardcoded software limits. It was slower and less efficient than the perfected version I started with, but the difference was between completely invalidating any and all possible security measures humans might ever come up with and ‘only’ being able to skip around what a conventional computer could throw at me.

I doubt I’d need to hack a quantum or semi-biological computer any time soon seeing as the former was still relegated to high end theoretical labs, and the latter was only used to store massive amounts of data you don’t need any time soon.

That still left me with optimizing my ULE mediated connections to devices, building defenses for myself, figuring out how to use my magic through remote devices, and most importantly- getting my magic to be self-sustaining. Annoyingly, I was on a timer for figuring out the last one. Sure, I could go back and reapply my RATs to all those computers again, but that sounded like a pain and I was sure there was some limit to [Act]. Probably.

With all the device data kindly sorted for me already, I started messing around on the less important computers; I didn’t need access or control over an intern’s phone, the random reception desktop, or dozens of printers. Progress was made difficult by the ULE draining faster the more I observed or tinkered with it.

After an hour or two, I had managed to feed a thin stream of my own energy to one of the throwaway testbeds. The issue was that maintaining the special connection used up more energy than I could possibly feed it, but it did allow me to watch how the ULE coexisted with the electricity. Overall, the two looked very closely intertwined. ULE would amass in the batter or power supply and trickle out through wires and boards to the areas currently being influenced by my perks, where it would do work before spontaneously converting to a tiny amount of heat or vibration.

Watching this made me realize just how much energy a computer actually uses. Some quick googling and math confirmed my suspicions: by my guesstimation, the per-hour power consumption of what I was experimenting with was a bit less than half a kilowatt hour. Now, that unit means less than nothing to the average person- myself included- but some further digging put it at about 400 kilocalories. So the equivalent of heating 400 kilograms of water by one degree.

That's enough to fully cook a person in four-ish hours under perfect conditions.

What piqued my interest was that a lot of that energy would be going to waste- but energy conversion to and from ULE was one of those things MG were naturally good at. This was even more true for me, probably due to the not-quite demon apparently  in my head, so I focused on reclaiming as much of this waste as I could. 

Like with the other aspects of this whole process, I had bits and pieces of fragments of memories to work with a basis. My hand-feeding of ULE let me figure out where what I captured needed to go, and moving the energy was as natural as letting my blood flow, so only the actual conversion posed a problem. This was amplified by the distance and degrees of separation making it like trying to build a flat-packed desk with those grabby-hand-pole-things people use to pick up litter.

After a few hours of being forced to start attempts over due to running out of ULE, I decided it was just too impractical to practice with random devices I had co-opted, so I switched to using my own servers. Immediately, progress picked up. I could perfectly repeat sections of the process, making very small adjustments, before stitching the improved procedure into the larger framework. Doing it like this was still slow since I had to get lucky with finding a good starting point, then inch my way to making it practical, but after another few hours, I managed to update one of my RATs with an energy-reclamation program that broke even.

Not for the RAT as a whole, just for the program gathering the energy. So from the outside, nothing changed except a sudden lack of heat being generated by the computer.

Another few hours let me improve my implementation to the point that it was just about efficient enough to power the RAT so long as I didn’t do anything with it. If the device was in a room with a heater cranked, maybe, just maybe, there could have been an almost meaningful amount of excess energy generated.

By the time that version was finished, my sleep cycle had hit a good wake up time, so resources had to be pulled for supporting my waking mind. Additionally, if I was getting up, that meant that most of the devices I infected could have their original users wanting them back- and I didn’t want to expose my actions. It would only take a curious MG to notice something was off, but as long as the energy was just sitting there, it was likely they wouldn’t care.

While my body was taking its sweet time to fully wake up, I ran through the things I should get done for the day.

The easiest was that my shed and flat-packed furniture were coming in today- so I’d need to go to the store to pick the order up. I didn’t know when the plane landed, nor how long it would take for the packages to be processed and moved to the storefront, so I set an alarm for three in the afternoon as a hopefully reasonable guess.

The next two were closely connected, both being experiments in applying a human’s natural pattern recognition with the significantly faster thinking speeds afforded by computers. The simpler proof of concept was a program to connect lip movements to speech so I could use my horns to ‘listen in’ on conversations. If that worked well, I could likely apply the same theory to a general purpose demon identification system. It was originally mostly an idea to get the government to pay me a lot of money, but now I was in it to maximize the amount of additional servers I could have set up for me as well as being able to spread accessible cameras as far as possible.

That goal tied neatly into my last, and most necessary problem to address: the secret demon invasion.

I still was undecided on what I was going to do- and any thought brushing near the topic brought a wave of nausea- but even if I decided to accept blissful ignorance, I hoped the infrastructure I could build might help the poor soul that has to deal with the issue. Especially since my idea was to create an app or generally downloadable program- open to the public for their ‘safety and information’- that definitely wouldn’t let me completely take over the device to spy on everyone around them for symptoms of infection.

The idea wasn’t very original. After all, it was an open secret that this sort of thing was like step one in making a modern government. I just had the benefit of magic to cheat on every step.

But before covert world domination, I needed to figure out how to make such a system. Unsurprisingly, it was pitifully easy. As weird as it was to think about, I was very close to an artificial general intelligence- just with a meat body I was sentimentally tied to- so normally finicky and obtuse image recognition algorithms could be ignored in favor of a more autonomous than normal fragment of my mind.

It would also be really annoying to have potentially thousands of identification requests flowing through the back of my mind at all times, so the viability of this project relied on being able to fully separate a hyper-focused shard of myself onto a device I could fully ignore.

The solution came from one of the fragments of the ex-perk [Can of Worms], which I had previously ignored in favor of the other bits of it that helped me build the almost self-sustaining program. Computer viruses lack the… parts to do anything except asexual reproduction, and out of all the information left from the perk’s integration into my morph, self-replication and spreading of programs was the most intact. With just a little experimentation to fill in gaps, I was easily able to put a lobotomized and hyper-censored copy of myself into one of my servers.

All it cared about was transcribing what it thought people were saying from how their lips moved. In fact, as far as it was concerned, lip-reading was both the meaning of life and literally all that existed in the universe.

Even better, after only an hour of watching myself as I orated my time-filling internet feeds, it had enough data to let me know what everyone in my building was saying, so long as it had enough bandwidth.

With the final addition of the ability to continue training itself as it worked, the project was a massive success. Just ignore the moral implications of the entire thing.