Lost Technology

<Lala>

MPN. Just hearing the name, I assumed it would be an inorganic, sterile space. But once we entered, I realized how different seeing and hearing can be—we were running on soil. Trees and flowers, seemingly nurtured by sprinklers, were blooming beautifully.

Though uninhabited, it was clear that someone maintained the space regularly. That meant security personnel for intruders like us could reach us easily. We had to move quickly.

Chanting a map spell with an alto voice, I raced through the labyrinthine structure.

I’m so grateful Tenuto knows AR (Augmented Reality) navigation magic. It's not a difficult spell, but hardly anyone bothers to learn it—truly a rare skill. Military families really are something else.

We reached the deepest part without encountering anyone.

In front of a giant stone slab stood a holographic touch panel. This must be the “Stargazer Recorder.”

It was beautiful. So this was “lost technology.” And yet, its design clearly resembled a QWERTY keyboard and touchpad—not just beautiful, but ergonomically thoughtful.

When I pressed what seemed like a power button, an unfamiliar OS booted up. Typinglsand pressing Enter displayed a list of files and directories. It appeared to operate on a command-line system similar to UNIX, which was a relief—at least it wasn’t totally foreign technology. Still, I broke into a cold sweat, sensing how long it might take to operate.

After some struggle, I found what looked like an integrated development environment (IDE) and launched it. A list of remote repositories appeared, and I skimmed through the documentation to find the one managing Karma Points.

Normally, you wouldn’t be able to pull source code to a local environment without going through two-factor authentication. But here, an analog workaround had been prepared: a three-person harmony.

“I’ll handle Pull and Fetch!”

“OK!”

“Did you practice?”

“Every day. Fifteen minutes of solo practice,” Forlorn replied cheerfully. Tenuto had bought three tuning forks and metronomes, so we were well-prepared and focused.

We stood before the speaker, Forlorn in the center, Tenuto and I flanking him. Tenuto used his finger as a baton and kept time in 4/4.

“LaLaLaLa~”

Our three voices harmonized. First, Pull succeeded—the blinking blue diode confirmed it. We followed up with the Fetch song, and once again, success.

Once the latest source was downloaded locally, I inspected the contents.

File extensions and programming languages I had never seen before.

But the momentary anxiety passed. As I read on, I saw it used a statically typed language, a design pattern similar to the MVC model, and method chaining in a modern implementation style. The methods and variables were clearly named in natural language, making it highly readable.

It was, essentially, no different from a robust, maintainable enterprise-level web framework. Even though the language was unfamiliar, it was entirely within my ability to decipher.

I had expected something flashier—some trendy language packed with statistical libraries—but surprisingly, it seemed robustness and backward compatibility were the real priorities.

With no documentation, the only choice was to extract information directly from the source code.

Most of the code dealt with calling external magical APIs and performing validation checks. What I needed was the core: the part that defined the business logic.

One thing stood out: heavy use of dependency injection. With such thoroughly decoupled code, updating it might take just a single line.

Or maybe not even that. I ran a search—not on the source code, but on configuration files. No promising results. That’s ridiculous. Then what other possibility...

“You’re amazing, Lala. If it were me, my brain's database would’ve exploded, haha,” Forlorn joked casually.

That offhand comment connected the dots in my mind.

“That’s it!”

A scripting language sending commands directly to the database—perhaps even performing the calculations there.

“I found it!”

A script pulling the sum of a mysterious value called D from an intermediate table used to calculate Karma Points.

This was the true formula behind the Karma Point system.

Having reached that point, I hesitated. If I replaced the summation logic with a zero, Karma Points would effectively vanish.

But I—

“I want to turn Karma Points into a new metric that brings happiness to everyone. Technology should serve happiness.”

“Lala…” Forlorn murmured.

“No time,” Tenuto said. “Sharp and Rabbid are headed this way as a pair. Forte’s already been flung outside the network by a spell. At this rate, we’ll be next.”

Tenuto's explanation made the situation clear. We no longer had time to read through more code or documents.

Quickly, I made the necessary changes. Commit. Push. Deploy. A revised version of the magical system, now live to the entire world.

But one final piece was missing from the puzzle: the true identity of D.