Enzo was in the Read Only Room, bored but determined. After spending a few seconds getting to know Matrix, he realized that Dot and Bob were lying when they told him he would automatically get smarter as he compiled. If he ever wanted to be anything but BASIC, he was going to have to do the upgrading himself.
Unfortunately, the Readme files, highly secured or not, were boring. With a capitol B, and maybe a G too, just for symmetry. Most of them chronologed for prosperity things like sector energy fluctuations and the daily function logs of binomes. At first he felt a guilty rush for spying on the minutiae of their lives, but soon he decided that the only thing more boring than the average binome's life was reading about it.
With a sigh, Enzo closed the dozen or so files he was glancing through, and opened a new dozen, completely at random. The files were all neatly labelled and placed in equally neatly labelled folders, but Phong seemed to be using the same system of organization he used for his drawer. If there were any connections between nearby files, they weren't chronological, or to do with the same individuals or sectors or even the same type of functions. Considering how mainframe tended to run most of the time, he shouldn't have been so surprised.
The most interesting of the new batch of files was a scientific report which put forward the hypothesis that nulls sucked energy. Enzo rolled his eyes. He wanted to give up on the whole thing, but if he was already doomed to look like Matrix, the last thing in the Net he wanted was to act like him too.
He opened more files. Energy fluctuations in Kits sector… initialization stats for a few binomes… a couple zeros doing something Dot wouldn't want him to take a closer look at… the recipe for Dot's Diner's energy shakes - Dot definitely wouldn't want him to take a closer look at that. He read down the recipe, just for spite, but the main section was deleted using a security code suspiciously similar to his sister's…. Energy fluctuations in Floating Point.
Maybe he could just stay away from pointy objects. And become a pacifist. And not work out, ever.
But then he'd just be BASIC and wimpy. There'd be no way AndrAIa would ever - Enzo shook his head. He just needed to find where Phong kept the interesting data. He dug through the folders to an area he hadn't looked at before. He opened a few files, but they didn't seem to make much sense. He squinted at them for a nanosecond before realizing they were written in older languages. He had never taken those classes seriously, but he had been paying closer attention to all his studies lately. Enzo opened a few more files and tried to decipher them.
What he could make out seemed to suggest the files all related to the same topic, although he still had no idea what that topic was. So the files predated even Phong's organizational skills. That was jaggy. Enzo had the impression that Phong had been around forever. He was pretty sure the old sprite had been there when the first games came down, and he wouldn't have been surprised to learn that Phong had compiled up amongst the wild Commodores.
He navigated through the files, trying to find the earliest one. Phong had told him that the Read Only Room contained all files since Mainframe itself was initialized, but it had never occurred to Enzo until now that that meant some of the files must have to do with that initialization. But a system couldn't record its own conception, so that meant the earliest of programs, the first file, had to have been written by the User itself.
Enzo hunted through the folders, his boredom replaced by a single-minded anxiety. The older the folders were, the less information they contained. Finally, he came to a folder that looked like it predated all the others. It was locked - but the same type of security measures that had let Enzo into the core let him open it. There were advantages to being a sprite.
The files inside, Enzo was disappointed to note, couldn't have been written before Mainframe came into existence. But they were closer than anything else he had accessed, and there were only five of them, and it was doubtful they could be any more tedious than the population listings. He opened one - it was all binary, but the strings of ones and zeros seemed to be nonsense. Another ancient language then.
Enzo found one in his memory that seemed to fit slightly, and tried to make sense of the file. He found he could organize the data into sentences and commands, but he couldn't translate most of the individual concepts. Something about power, or command, maybe, which was a completely different thing. And then there was a break, and a new section of binary that didn't seem to relate to any grammar structure he knew of. It wasn't very long, so he read it out loud, to see if it made more sense if he heard it. "One oh oh oh one oh…." He stumbled in surprise over something that could have been an energy group, if it had been plain DOS, but was probably gibberish. "…Oh oh one one," he finished. Nothing.
The file ended, so he opened the other four. They were just as useless, but Enzo couldn't shake the thought he had stumbled on the nature of compilation and was too BASIC to understand it.
"Story of my runtime," he grumbled. But he was tired of being confused, and there wasn't anything else to do but go back to the files he could read and be bored out of his processor again.
He closed the Readmes and left the room, feeling like he had accomplished nothing. And maybe he wasn't any smarter, but there was next cycle, and the cycle after that, and all the cycles of all the minutes until he was compiled up. He'd be smarter by then, even if he just became the system's foremost expert on energy fluctuations.