Chapter 364 Alice's Miscalculation

*Five minutes earlier*

"This doesn't make any real sense…" Alice muttered while furiously tapping her fingers against the floating hologram of a keyboard.

She had her eyes glued to the holoscreen floating roughly a meter away from her face and surrounding roughly eighty percent of her entire vision span.

Alice's fingers stopped. She locked a certain set of data on the screen before raising her thumb to her mouth and chewing on its fingernail.

'So cute,' Castor thought from the back of the ship.

Despite gaining the grace of the auditor, he decided against changing his sanctuary for a newer, bigger ship. He was too used to this small piece of junk that he called home for more than three consecutive missions.

Alice, at first, wasn't all too pleased with the idea of staying on such a piece of wreckage welded together to form the tiniest sanctuary the procedures allowed. And yet, after only a few days, she grew not only used but also attached to the tiny insides of the ship.

Sure, it felt claustrophobic at times, but there were some perks to the tiny interior of Castor's sanctuary. And one of them was how he could be busy preparing a meal for the two of them without losing any of the adorable sights of Alice's small actions as she worked on the system bestowed upon the planet below them.

"Still trying to crack that casket open?" Castor asked, leaning forward to catch a glance at the content on Alice's screens.

Ever since she came on board, she instantly went on to work on the mess left behind by Catlea.

Just fixing the system to the point she could actually do some proper work took her half the day. And half a day's worth of work of someone positioned so damn high in the fleet's hierarchy was worth quite a bit more than an entire month of the grind of your average system operator.

Still, she nailed it. In slightly less than half of a single cycle of the planet revolving around its own axis, she cleared out most of the unnecessary and simply abundant procedures, finally reaching the system's core.

And that's where Alice, one of the few coding aces of the fleet, ended up stuck.

Save for some makeshift patches she slapped on the most critical points of the system evolution, she spend every free moment she had since in pretty much futile attempts at making any sense of the core of the system.

"I'm not one to give up so easily," Alice replied with the thumb still in her mouth and her eyes glued to the screen.

After his quick glance, Castor didn't even bother trying to understand the huge arrays of numbers and commands present on the girl's screen. Just seeing her struggle to understand it was enough for the man to know he couldn't figure it out himself even if he were to spend the rest of his life working on it.

'It's curious how Catlea managed to mess this up so damn hard even Alice struggles to resolve it,' Castor thought, adding two units of spice to the automatic kettle before launching the program specified within the integrated recipe.

"I don't mean to tell you what to do, but don't you need to take a look at that case of ours?" Castor asked, unable to hold back his worries.

The specific case he had in mind was related to the one guy that managed to make the most out of how messy the core system was. And from the last report he checked, he was pretty damn close to the next step of the system evolution, something that Alice only hurriedly patched to hide how this entire part of the system… has yet to be properly developed!

"Worst case scenario I will just scramble the lower levels to combine a next one," Alice replied, minding not the slight rudeness behind Castor's question.

He was the owner of the ship they were in and the person in charge of the evolution of the civilization on the planet below… But in terms of expertise, he wasn't even an ant when compared to the horsepower Alice packed in her brain.

"Again, I don't want to order you around, but…"

A loud, beeping noise cut Castor's sentence short.

A second later, a message in red flashed on the right side of Alice's holoscreen.

[User-set alarm]

[Agent is about to open up the undeveloped part of the system]

The message was short. But its timing couldn't be worse.

'Damn,' Castor held back his breath. 'I only wanted for her to make sure this wouldn't happen…'

Castor bit down his lips so hard he tore through the outer layer of the polymer that covered them.

A tiny bit of blue blood oozed out of his lip, instantly covering the full extent of the wound and allowing the nanites within the blood to patch the injury up.

"It looks like you were right," Alice said with a sigh before waving her hand to the side and putting all of her ongoing work aside.

The alert itself was set to appear whenever someone would near the completion of the second stage. And up to this point, it flashed twice.

In the last two instances, Alice managed to solve the situation by coding down the entire extent of the next phase for the successful agents in a mere moment.

This time, however, the second the status of the situation appeared on her holoscreen, the girl froze.

"Are you for fucking real?" Alice muttered as her eyes opened up wide.

This was the first time for Castor to see the girl so agitated to let her emotions show on her face… or to actually utter a curse out loud!

'It's those guys,' Castor thought. Just a single look at the mess that appeared on the girl's screens instead of a few neat lines of the core information about the agents sufficed to prove his thought correct.

After all, out of all the problematic agents Alice's private scanning software detected, only the case Castor was worried about could produce such a mess of a report.

At least two thousand different points of origin converged to give birth to the natural evolution of the system which that specific agent used. A far cry from the original ten to twelve that all the other agents could access. A result that could only come to be due to that particular's agent lucking out and interfering with the damn time continuum!

And now, Alice had to figure out all the most important details from this mess before hurrying it up to develop a next phase that would somehow make any sense!

"I'm sorry, I really should've taken a look into it earlier," Alice muttered right as her fingers moved towards the keyboard once more before she started to furiously type new lines of code.

'Huh?' Castor's face twitched.

His memory about his former partner was all fuzzy, obstructed by the blockers that made great work on his memory. And while he couldn't recall any specific events, there was one thing he was damn sure of.

This wasn't how this situation would play out in the past.