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After officially becoming Wellington's student — and finally starting to calm his "military ignorance" — **Arthur Lionheart** threw himself even more into the daily operations of the **Royal Academy of Sciences**.
He knew perfectly well that the Academy was the lever he needed.
Through it, he could shift not just the Empire… but the entire world.
On this particular day, the Academy hosted a small private exhibition at its headquarters.
The star of the event was one of its brightest minds: **Charles Babbage**, Cambridge mathematician, resident genius, and borderline mad inventor.
Tall, hair perpetually disordered, and lost in his private universe of gears and equations, Babbage was the very definition of an obsessive academic who barely remembered that the outside world existed.
Today, he unveiled the work of his lifetime: **Difference Engine No. 2**.
A machine that had devoured years of effort and rivers of government funding.
When Arthur led a small group of nobles and bankers into Babbage's workshop, the room fell silent.
The thing towering before them looked like the exposed skeleton of some mechanical titan — thousands of brass and steel gears, rods, shafts, and polished components locked together in terrifying precision. Two meters tall, nearly three long, and occupying half the room.
"Gentlemen," Babbage declared proudly, almost glowing, "this is my *Difference Engine*! A thinking machine! One capable of performing complex mathematical calculations without human hands!"
He strode to the crank and began to turn it.
*Clack… click… clack… click…*
The whole beast came alive — gears meshing, digits flipping, shafts spinning in a sequence so intricate it bordered on hypnotic.
Finally, with a clear metallic *ding*, a small printing mechanism stamped a long strip of paper with rows of logarithmic tables.
The nobles gasped.
"It… it calculates by itself!"
"This is sorcery!"
They had no idea what the numbers meant, of course — but the idea of a machine that *thought* was enough to blow their minds.
Arthur, though, quietly exhaled.
From his previous life, he knew exactly how revolutionary Babbage's concept would one day be.
But he also knew its limits: a purely mechanical engine was fragile, painfully slow, and prone to catastrophic error if even a single gear misaligned.
Brilliant in theory.
Commercially? Practically useless.
"Professor Babbage, your genius is undeniable," Arthur said politely — then added, with surgical precision:
"But forgive my bluntness. This magnificent machine seems… delicate. And painfully complex. If we asked it to calculate something massive — say, the budget for laying tracks across a future National Railway Network — how long would it take? A month? Half a year?"
Babbage's smile froze.
The shot hit dead center.
He knew better than anyone that his engine wasn't much faster than a trained human calculator — and far less reliable.
Which was exactly why government funding had begun to dry up.
Just as the room slipped into awkward silence, a clear, intelligent female voice cut through the tension.
"Your Highness is correct. Pure mechanical computation does have its limits."
Arthur turned — and froze.
A young woman stood there, dressed in a dark gown, posture impeccable, eyes bright with sharp intelligence.
Not a classical beauty, but striking in the way only someone *truly brilliant* could be.
Arthur's heart skipped.
He knew who she was instantly.
"And you would be…?" he asked, pretending ignorance.
Babbage stepped forward, his tone softening with admiration.
"This is the Countess Lovelace — Ada Lovelace. My assistant, and one of the finest mathematicians in Britain. Possibly in all of Europe. Her understanding of my Analytical Engine is deeper than even my own."
**Ada Lovelace.**
The future mother of programming.
Arthur looked at her with genuine, unmasked admiration.
He could feel history stirring.
"Countess Lovelace," he said, bowing lightly, "a pleasure. Since you agree that pure mechanics have limits… what do you believe computation should become?"
Ada blinked, surprised he asked her directly.
She hesitated, thinking, then said slowly:
"I've wondered… if instead of relying on physical gears to represent all numbers and operations, perhaps we should use something simpler. Something more fundamental."
A pause.
"A system that has only *two* possible states. Like an on/off switch. Or answering a question with 'yes' or 'no'."
Arthur felt his pulse quicken.
She was almost there.
She was brushing against the foundation of binary — the root of the entire digital world.
But he couldn't hand her the answer outright.
No genius should be robbed of the joy of discovery.
He needed to *nudge* her — subtly.
"Two states…" Arthur repeated thoughtfully.
"We have an old philosophical model in Europe — the idea that many complex things can be built from the simplest opposing principles. Presence and absence. Light and dark. Motion and stillness. In their minimal form… a one and a zero."
Ada's eyes widened.
Arthur pressed on gently, weaving it into a logical framework rather than an imported philosophy:
"For centuries, scholars have argued that the universe can be reduced to fundamental oppositions. And that every complex phenomenon is just combinations of these basic states.
Imagine," he continued, voice low and steady, "a system where *every* calculation, instruction, and operation is built from only two symbols: **0 and 1**."
"Zero and one…" Ada whispered, trembling with excitement.
"To build everything… from just zero and one?"
Her entire being lit up.
The scattered fragments of her earlier thoughts aligned.
A door opened.
And behind it lay an entirely new continent of ideas.
She stared at Arthur not with politeness anymore — but with the devotion of someone witnessing revelation.
"Your Highness!" she exclaimed, grasping his arm.
"Please — tell me more. About this idea of constructing everything from two fundamental states!"
Arthur smiled.
The seed of binary — the foundation of the entire future of computation — was now planted in the mind of the world's first programmer.
And he knew Ada Lovelace would make it grow into something that would shake the world.
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