7.14 - Consistent Randomness
Theo was excited for a nice, calm morning the next day. He woke and ate a pleasant breakfast at his table, taking his time and watching in amazement as Tresk did the same. Now that she wasn’t so busy with the dungeons, she seemed to have fallen back into her habit of shadowing him for most of the day. Alex lingered outside, doing whatever a dragon goose does, while Sarisa and Rowan ate with them.
Despite his standing invitation, Salire still didn’t feel the need to eat breakfast with him. Perhaps it was just too weird, having breakfast with your boss every morning.
That peaceful breakfast was broken when someone knocked on the door. Opening it, the alchemist found Xol’sa, a smile on his face. He let himself in, finding a place at the table and laying out long sheets of paper, and waiting for Theo to take his seat.
“That’s the look of a man who actually has good news for me, for once,” Theo said, sitting down at his place and picking at his food.
“Of course, I’m done with the tethers and beacons, and I’ve made some decent progress on the negative dungeon. Thanks to Tresk, actually.”
Theo turned, looking at the marshal, who shrugged as though she had done absolutely nothing.
“What can I say?” she asked. “I picked through your memories and saw some computer stuff.”
Xol’sa went on to explain what the dungeon was doing. It was an idea about computers that Theo had heard once on Earth, and Tresk was able to pick through his memories and find it. But the system expected dungeons to always have a positive value. When it went negative, weird things would happen. It was called an undertow, or underflow, or something. Anyway, once it went negative, it started looking in weird spots in the system’s code to populate the dungeon. That resulted in a completely random dungeon. Every aspect of it was random, which was slightly concerning.
“We can have a dungeon that never produces a wave, or a dungeon that produces a wave every second for the rest of eternity,” Xol’sa explained. “The point is that if a dungeon is completely random, we can see anything, and that’s a problem.”