Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1313: The Information Age

In Graycastle, Neverwinter.

The reports on the battle at Archduke Island and the situation in the Kingdom of Wolfheart reached Roland’s hands two days later.

Compared to the old days—when a letter from the City of Evernight to Neverwinter took the better part of a week—the progress in their communications was undeniable. Short-distance couriers by air, long-distance delivery by steam-powered boats running around the clock: dedicated personnel, dedicated vessels for crucial messages, and in some cases even planes pressed into service. This time, the reports had been carried by Tilly herself.

“Good job.” Roland handed her a Chaos Drink with something approaching solicitude. “How is the situation holding up over there?”

“You could answer that yourself by reading the report.” Tilly took the cup and gave him a sidelong look. “Acting this considerate—are you feeling guilty about something? Could it be you still haven’t made any progress on my plane?”

A barely suppressed sound of laughter came from somewhere behind him.

“Of course not. I’ve already selected the best design from among a great many blueprints. As soon as Anna has time, we begin prototype production.”

“For Anna’s sake, I’ll let it go.” Tilly drained her cup in one swallow, wiped her lips, and turned for the office door. “Seagull will be heading back soon, so I’m returning to the Aerial Knight Academy first.”

“You won’t stay even a day?”

“I can’t.” She paused with her back to him, hand raised in a parting wave. “Right now the only things on the frontline that can threaten the Sky Lord are Seagull and Andrea. And I don’t want to miss a single chance at revenge.” The door swung shut behind her.

Nightingale’s sigh filled the silence. “Everyone is working so hard.”

If it were possible, I’d rather they worked hard at anything other than war, Roland thought. But he didn’t say it—because until the Battle of Divine Will was decided, until the fate of humanity was settled, no one could be free of this burden. Saying so now would accomplish nothing except feel like a shirking of responsibility.

He waited a moment, then broke the seal on the first report.

By the time he finished reading, Roland understood what Tilly had meant. To have issued the evacuation order in time and then successfully ambushed a grand demon lord whose movements were untraceable above the open sea—that was an extraordinary feat. Edith Kant and Andrea were the undisputed key contributors. But the sender of the crucial intelligence could not be overlooked; without that person’s selfless act, victory would not have been possible at all.

“What do you plan to do?” The question had clearly caught Nightingale’s attention as well.

“Whatever his original motive for sending the letter, his name and his contribution must not be forgotten,” Roland said quietly.

In his previous life, tracking down an unidentified informant after a prolonged campaign was virtually impossible. The gravestone would have read: Your name is unknown; your deeds are everlasting. Here, witches changed the arithmetic. They made it possible to give every person who contributed to humanity’s survival a name and a place in the record. “After the First Army reclaims the Kingdom of Everwinter, have ‘Black Money’ help Summer establish this person’s full name and background.”

If whoever had killed him was still alive by then, they would not escape the law.

Nightingale nodded. “If only we could build that communications system you described—the one capable of spanning thousands of miles.”

“Unfortunately that isn’t one of my strengths.” Roland pressed his forehead with two fingers. Just recalling the circuit diagrams he had been forced to memorize made the back of his eyes ache.

“Now you understand how I feel during exams,” Nightingale said, hand over her mouth.

“It isn’t remotely the same. A certain someone simply fell asleep on the desk and handed in a blank sheet.” Roland gave her a flat look. “I have nearly finished the prototype.”

And that was the truth, if barely. The radio communications project had never stopped—only crawled.

Like the piston engine, he had examined numerous designs from the Design Bureau of Graycastle and eventually chosen two to develop in parallel: the spark-gap transmitter and the amplitude-modulated transmitter.

The spark-gap transmitter was the grandfather of all wireless communication. Its design was elemental—no electronic components required. A transformer coil stepped up the voltage to charge a capacitor until the voltage ionized the air and produced an electric spark. The principle was not unlike a lighter, except that instead of being wasted, the current discharged by the spark oscillated rapidly back and forth between the capacitor’s plates through the inductor and the spark gap, generating electromagnetic waves that were then broadcast through an antenna.

In other words: control the switch on the power source, and intermittent electromagnetic waves could be sent out. A receiver listening to the duration of those sounds could translate them into corresponding signals. The varied-length beeps of telegraph code were born from exactly this principle.

It still sounded a little abstract even now. Roland had therefore taken the most practical approach—having the radio communications team at the Design Bureau assemble a working machine from available materials, then replicate it.

For instance: two pieces of tin foil with a sheet of oiled paper between them, sealed in wax, became a basic high-voltage capacitor. The inductor was simpler still—wire wound in coils around an insulated pipe. When mass production and precise specifications were set aside, Roland could build the device himself. Compared to the industrial components that came in fingernail-sized packages in his previous life, these were ungainly and crude—but the underlying effect was the same. Once the transmission tower’s construction was finished, the era’s first wireless communication experiment would be possible.

The spark-gap transmitter’s drawbacks, however, were equally plain.

Even after a successful trial, designing a code matched to the kingdom’s language would take time, as would training operators on both ends. Worse, the spark-gap transmitter threw an extremely wide frequency spectrum, meaning only one transmitter could operate within a given region without interference. For intelligence personnel working the frontlines, it was practically useless.

His real goal remained the amplitude-modulated transmitter—the AM transmitter—which used vacuum tubes to amplify a signal, and whose decisive advantage was the ability to transmit voice directly.

In principle, radio and telephone were close cousins. Both converted the oscillations of sound into changes in current or electromagnetic waves, and at the far end converted them back into sound. The difference was that the human voice occupied a very low frequency, which produced wavelengths far too long for any practical antenna—transmitting voice signals directly would demand an antenna stretching over a hundred kilometers. That was not a construction problem; it was simply impossible.

The solution was to carry the voice signal on a higher-frequency wave.

That was modulation.

Once the receiver captured the new composite waveform, it had to strip away the high-frequency carrier waves through demodulation and recover only the meaningful low-frequency signal—restoring it, finally, into audible sound.

Once the AM transmitter succeeded, both the First Army and the intelligence services would have real-time communications capability across any distance.

For war, the significance of that required no elaboration.

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