I haven't swallowed the bitter pill yet, so I'm still working with what I've already got. I managed to make something, but on the scale of what I know is possible it's basically a toy. And I have no idea how to successfully make another. Why isn't alchemy more precise?

At least now I can use it to fake my way into better research facilities.

On that though, if you find somewhere with some truly old genuine magical texts, you're likely to have two problems. The simple one is translation. This limited me to stuff in English (mostly useless) and in Egyptian. Hidden behind all the ritual and metaphor, I figured a few things out. I *might* be able to imbue something with its own awareness and decision-making, better than AI but not truly a consciousness as I understand it. It would do what I want it to, even work out how to, but otherwise it would just wait for me to tell it what to do. So not even as self aware as a bird.

I shouldn't have tried to do more than that, not yet. Skipping ahead too far led me to open the wrong book. Unlike fantasy stories, it wasn't chained in place or moving about, all it did was hum. I could hear it in the case, I could see it through the glass, I could pick the simple lock. And I did, and I regret it.

I don't think a normal person could hear it, I don't think it would hurt them if they had. I just *had* to take out my loupe though, for a closer look at a diagram. I guess it was the magical equivalent of a fractal, the details just kept going and somehow it pulled me in. It didn't tell me how to wake a machine into full sapience, it woke me. In waking me, it drew my consciousness in. My watch said it was just over three minutes, but it felt like three weeks. Three weeks in a world of nothing but symbols, in a lot more dimensions than a simple three or four, and I understood so little. I'm still deciphering what I remember.