System Programmer Chapter 37: Reverse Engineering

Reverse engineering is the process in which an unknown item is deconstructed in order to learn how it was crafted in the first place and establish a way to reproduce the object. This can be done for physical objects, for example, you could take a car engine apart piece by piece to learn how it was built. For software, it is usually a bit more complicated as you need the right tools in order to turn a program back into its source code. It goes without saying that a tool to take runes apart didn't exist. Joshua was, thus, left to his own devices in order to realize the task he had set out to accomplish.

He began by establishing a list of possible ways this could work. That list included very serious methods as well as extremely silly stuff that would most likely fail. Unsurprisingly, Joshua started with the latter.

First, he tried to smash the rune with a hammer. It went better as expected, the floating rune just disintegrated upon being broken, he had expected it to explode in his face. Next, he materialized a bowl on a dining table and filled it with very small versions of the fire rune. He then added milk to the lot, grabbed a spoon and took a bite out of it. The idea was simple: since Luna was able to a.n.a.lyze unknown food by having him taste it, maybe eating 'rune cereal' might discover something new. Unfortunately what followed was a scene worthy of old Tex Avery cartoons as Joshua ran around the room breathing fire for about five minutes while tears were streaming down his eyes. This might sound m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic but he actually found the whole thing hilarious. In any case, after drinking a couple of liters of water, he decided it was time to stop goofing around and made his first serious attempt.

The most logical way to proceed was to determine the composition of a rune. The strange energy was omnipresent in the air in this world and could be used to nourish both one's mind and body. Runes were no different and were made entirely out of energy, the main difference was that to create a rune, the energy had to be solidified and given a specific form. Thanks to the books he had read recently, he now had a way to make it happen in the real world and not just in his mind. In fact, the process was fairly similar to how he materialized objects ever since his soul reached rank two, except a crafted rune was a permanent item while the objects he made vanished as soon as he released the energy maintaining their existence.

Joshua considered making some sort of microscope to enlarge the image of the rune but then had a better idea. This was his soul world. He could create anything he wanted. First, he dismissed about everything in his world except the mandatory computer's parts that were everywhere. Next, he created the little fire rune again, except he made it gigantic. It stretched through the entirety of his world. Thanks to his large energy reserve, maintaining a mental image like this wasn't much of an issue. He hoped that with such a gigantic rune, he could follow the energy flow and see what was happening.

He touched the rune and sent a tiny bit of energy into it. Due to the ridiculous size of the rune, what usually happened instantly took a few seconds and Joshua saw the energy he released being gathered on one end of the rune. Unfortunately, once the energy was absorbed, even this gigantic rune couldn't reveal what was happening inside. He could only see fire being released on the other end and creating a fire layer around the rune. He shook his head in disappointment and made the giant structure vanish. Time to go back to the drawing board.

Joshua was scratching his head about what to do. If this were a computer program, he would put 'breakpoints' everywhere. A breakpoint is a software development technique used to debug code. The basic idea is that it pauses a program midway to allow to see the state of the various variables at every point you indicate. This is particularly useful when you have a piece of code that's not doing what you want it to do but can't find what's wrong. So you put breakpoints at every turn to see where the program goes haywire. Of course, breakpoints can only be used in a test environment, once a program is compiled and deployed on a machine, you can't use that method so what was normally done in a production environment in order to notice errors is to use logging. Obviously, Joshua had no way to write output into a file via a rune but there was an alternative. There is a very dumb way to simulate breakpoints or logging in case they are not available for some reason. Print the data on the screen between every line of code.

The idea was very ugly in design, but it didn't matter. Joshua restored the rooms he had dismissed earlier and entered his lab. As he sat down behind his desk, he began to check every rune he had entered into his repertoire recently. In the end, a pair of runes caught his attention: it was the runes employed by the security cameras he had seen. The runes were used together, one was used to record input, the other was used to broadcast the output on a screen. That's exactly what he needed.

The fire rune was extremely simple in design so Joshua tried to alter it by incorporating the input rune at every turn. This gave a very bizarre result. Imagine a simple drawing, for example, a square that's 10 by 10 centimeters. Now, imagine that every centimeter of the square lines, suddenly the square is interrupted and the drawing of a triangle is put in between the parts of the drawing. That is more or less what Joshua tried to do. Since he also required an output, he materialized a monitor imprinted with the output rune. Not sure what to expect, he tried activating the rune.

The bad news was, this didn't do at all what he intended. The good news was… he accidentally invented a rune that created mayonnaise. Not letting that go to waste, he quickly materialized a portion of french fries and tasted it. It was delicious. No really, it was the best achievement of the day, he wouldn't let it go to waste. He had been working for several hours now, so he used the opportunity to take a short break and review what he had done so far.

He was still convinced he could somehow alter the input rune to get a visual on the interior of the rune. Thinking back, that rune had multiple functions. Not only was it engraved on the various cameras in the building, but it was also used to get live footage from the wild. He doubted the one engraved on an animal would be completely the same as the one on an object so he was curious to get his hands on a sample.

This wasn't a new request, he had talked to the party about this shortly after they had discovered the security room and they had promised him to try and get a live specimen of one of those animals. He was in luck, Catherine had informed him that using the camera's footage as guidance, Lydia had managed to catch a bird who happened to pa.s.s near the building a few hours ago. Joshua had yet to examine it, so he appeared back in the real world and went over to the lab where the bird was being held in a cage.

Joshua gently grabbed the little creature and scanned it. With Luna's improved knowledge about engraving runes in one's body, he found what he was looking for effortlessly. There was a single rune in the bird's head. While at its core it was the input rune, a few changes were made to it so it would connect to the bird's eyes. The other interesting part is that he recognized the pattern that made the rune genetically transmissible. This didn't surprise him, there was no way Delila had inscribed runes in all those animals by herself. What most likely had happened is that the scientists who used to operate the place most likely inscribed a few animals with those runes and released them all in the wild. Since the runes were transmitted from parent to child, the animals living today still had them inside their head. Satisfied with this little inspection, Joshua headed to the surface and let the bird go free. The little fellow had rendered him a great service, it would be criminal to keep it trapped in here.

The altered rune was already closer to what he wanted. He rushed back to his lab and started to make some changes to it. He tried a few alternatives, but he still didn't get any results with the fire rune so he changed tactics. Since he now knew how to engrave a rune inside a body, he developed a method to add a rune to his own body when he materialized. He started with the same rune he had seen inside the bird. He was pleased to see that the experiment worked, on the output monitor he created, there stood the same image his eyes were seeing.

Satisfied, he began to alter the rune so instead of showing what his eyes were seeing, it would display the interior of his body, like some sort of x-ray. It took a few attempts to get it right, the first tries gave a blurry image, similar to trying to watch a cable channel without the decoder. When he finally got a clear image of his insides, he grinned. He was getting close!

The rest of the day was spent in him making change after change trying to get his little experiment to succeed. After much sweat, tears, and blood, he let out a big sigh. He had managed to develop a program where the input rune would take another rune as input and monitor its insides while the other rune was being activated. It was time to see what the h.e.l.l was happening inside a rune! Full of antic.i.p.ation, he activated the fire rune. He did it a few times and thanks to the new program, Luna recorded everything. Since the process was extremely fast, he had Luna replay it by slowing the speed down by a thousand. The entire process was very strange and he wasn't sure what to make out of it. He couldn't help but have a strange feeling upon watching the whole thing. Deciding he needed more samples, he ordered Luna to perform the same operation with all the runes he knew. As he saw the process being repeated rune after rune, Joshua's feeling slowly became a theory. He had a lot of runes now and inspecting each one like that took a good amount of time and Joshua's smile grew wider and wider as his theory became a cert.i.tude. When Luna was finally done, he was trembling in excitement.

'This changes everything…' he thought.